Office 10, the latest Microsoft Office suite, which is due out in early-to-mid 2001, is shaping up to be geared toward small businesses to a much greater extent than any of its predecessors.

Beta versions of the product (released in early August) revealed several new features that promise to make small office life a little simpler, and could even save you time and money. Microsoft has added several security features that may help reduce your company's vulnerability to everything from computer crashes to nasty e-mail viruses.

New and improved recovery capabilities have been introduced to help ensure that users do not permanently lose files when there is a software program malfunction, or if their computers crash. Outlook's security has also been upgraded, and can disable VBScript, which could mean that viruses and other harmful files won't have the opportunity to spread as easily.

If your business has an Internet or intranet server, Office 2000 makes it simple to bring everyone together with SharePoint and Office Web Server. These new applications facilitate building and running intranet team sites, where you can share files, hold discussions, post events and announcements, and store common contact and task lists.

You will be able to save documents as Web pages, automatically kept as HTML files, meaning all you or your employees have to do is choose the online location where you want to hold the documents. For the many small businesses, though, that do not have their own Internet or intranet servers, Microsoft is reportedly teaming up with a number of ISPs who have agreed to host SharePoint, so you, too, can use the Web to your advantage.

The Small Business version of Office 10 comes with an application called Customer Manager, which makes tracking transactions, collecting and organizing information about your customers, and creating customized mailings a far simpler task.

Voice recognition will also be a part of the newest Office suite. Available for use on all Office applications, it allows users to compose e-mails, memos, and short letters by simply dictating them aloud to the computer. But, as with any voice recognition software available today, hang on to your keyboard and mouse. This capability is a nice bonus, but should by no means be relied upon too heavily, as its accuracy rates could be higher (85-90%) and it cannot be used with anything outside of the suite's applications.

If you're a Mac user, or have both PCs and Macs in your office, you'll be happy to know that the Mac version boasts simpler application user interfaces, plus the ability to save a Mac file such that it can be accessed by a PC user, which to date has been a problematic endeavor. Also, Office 10 for Macs is more compatible with some Mac-only software, most notably, the AppleWorks suite of applications.

Microsoft has even made buying the newest suite easier on your budget. They are introducing an option to lease the software via an annual subscription. If upgrading all the computers in your small business proposes a financial problem, then look into this option. You install the suite from a CD-ROM, and then upgrade, as necessary, off the Internet.

Of course, there are always drawbacks. Right now, the product is still in its Beta testing phase, and there are several wrinkles that could use some ironing. The biggest concerns are the system requirements, which might leave some people unable to take advantage of Microsoft's new program. It does not run on Windows 95, and it needs 250MB of disk space.