However, product activation is no longer required as of April 15, 2003. Microsoft extended this requirement to retail editions sold in Canada and the United States with the availability of Office 2000 Service Release 1. All retail editions sold in Australia, Brazil, China, France, and New Zealand, as well as academic copies sold in Canada and the United States, required the user to activate the product via the Internet. An additional Personal edition exclusive to Japan was also released. Microsoft released five main editions of Office 2000 globally: Standard, Small Business, Professional, Premium, and Developer. It also comes with Internet Explorer 5 and uses its technologies as well.
It is also the first version of Office to use Windows Installer for the installation process. Office 2000 introduces PhotoDraw, a raster and vector imaging program, as well as Web Components. New features in Office 2000 include HTML document creation and publishing, Internet collaboration features such as integration with NetMeeting, roaming user profile support, COM add-in support an updated version of the Office Assistant, improved compliance with the year 2000, and interface improvements including personalized menus and toolbars that omit infrequently used commands from view.
It is the successor to Office 97 and the predecessor to Office XP.
Office 2000 was released to manufacturing on March 29, 1999, and was made available to retail on June 7, 1999. Microsoft Office 2000 is a release of Microsoft Office, an office suite developed and distributed by Microsoft for the Windows family of operating systems.