In "Outlook 10 and Office Designer," January 2001, I described the features Microsoft planned to include in its new Office release in spring 2001. In December 2000, Microsoft took the extreme step of removing the Office Designer program and the Local Web Storage System (LWSS) from Office 10. Microsoft intended the LWSS, a key enabling technology for Designer, to be a major architectural enhancement for Outlook. LWSS was to connect Outlook to Exchange 2000 Server over HTTP and also provide a local Active Server Pages (ASP) engine to allow Web Storage System (WSS) applications to run totally offline. Microsoft had planned Designer as a tool to help administrators quickly deploy survey, document management, and other standard applications with templates and to provide a robust development environment for programmers working on WSS applications for Exchange 2000 and the new Tahoe server. Microsoft's announcement said the company is "currently evaluating the future direction for the functionality provided in these features."
