Microsoft Launches Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Visio 2010

[engine]

Microsoft Launches Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Visio 2010 [microsoft.com]

Microsoft Corp. announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, as well as Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010, for business customers worldwide. More than 90 million businesses can now deploy the 2010 suite of products, and customers can expect to see significant productivity gains and greater return on their software investments.

“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 define the future of productivity,” said Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division. “With the 2010 set of products, organizations will save, innovate and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone and browser.”

Microsoft aims to sell business on Office 2010 [news.cnet.com]

After months of pitching businesses on Office 2010, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop is excited to start selling the product.

Although it won't hit store shelves for another month, large businesses can now start buying the latest versions of Office and SharePoint, an event which will be marked later on Wednesday with an event in New York. With this version of the product, Office is going in several new places, with the most important of those being to the Web browser.

Along with the traditional desktop applications, the new Office features Web-based versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Businesses can offer them to workers via the new SharePoint, while consumers will soon be able to get them for free via Windows Live.

That evolution, says Elop, is part of what makes the new Office a compelling upgrade, regardless of what the competition says.

"We are focused on delivering the best productivity experience across the PC, the phone, and the browser," Elop told CNET in an interview this week. That means the new Web apps, yes, but also powerful desktop features such as photo and video editing as well as new versions of Office for mobile devices--though notably not for the iPhone.

The online version will be worth evaluating, imho.

[bill]

It's good to see them keeping to the schedule [webmasterworld.com]. Office 2010 won't be available to the public until sometime in June.

Office 2010 is a big product for MS. I'm very interested to see how the final online integration works.

Did anybody play with the betas?

[grelmar]

I'm actually curious if the crowd here are big consumers of MS Office. Our office is pro-actively dumping it. Sure, Sharepoint and Office have some very slick features, very Rolls Royce.

But when we went around and surveyed how people actually use office productivity software, it became pretty clear that the extra bells and whistles that would justify MS Office over OpenOffice weren't being used. In an office of 40+ people, that's more than $20K Cdn we just don't need to spend.

Our 2003 licenses are still valid, but with the compatibility pain that 2003 has with newer document formats, OpenOffice just works better than Office 2003. So we had to choose, spend the $$ on 2010, or move to OO.

Anyone here know of any good, compelling reasons to stick with MS Office? Technically, we're an MSA reseller (we use the SPLA keys for our downstream clients), so we're anything but "anti-MS". It's just we're having increasing difficulty justifying the costs.

As a side note: Our infrastructure guys are all smiles about this. Aparently, the Management and Marketing types are bugging them less about application crashes since we've moved away from MS Office and Outlook for OO and (an un-named open source email client).

[bill]

Smaller offices like yours may find it easy to switch, but when you've got several thousand installs, systems in place, years of training, and customers who rely on the compatibility of exchanging data in MS formats, then the choice isn't so easy.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I have used both MS office as well as OO. The biggest difference comes when you have send reports to clients as OO compiled reports lose a lot of formatting elements when opened on MS office plus MS office as much better visual appeal for graphs and data , IMO.

[ByronM]

With the webapps being free I think office will make a slight comeback, especially once they implement their skydrive as a standard storage system across the board.

[grelmar]

Smaller offices like yours may find it easy to switch, but when you've got several thousand installs, systems in place, years of training, and customers who rely on the compatibility of exchanging data in MS formats, then the choice isn't so easy.

I can totally agree with that - Large offices with entrenched IT standards and practices are very slow to change. I would even go so far as to argue that companies with more than 250 or 300 staff would be in a tough spot if they had to make the change.

Also, large companies see greater benefits from Sharepoint and all the collaborative functions of MS office pay their way.

But for small(ish) companies, which used to be really bread and butter sales for Microsoft, is the value still there?

I can generate the reports in OO, then spend a few minutes using CS4 to "glitz it up" a bit and pump it out to customers in a PDF that looks really high quality, better than MS office can do, actually. CS4, sadly, we can't get away from (and the expense there is even worse than MS Office)...

Ok, I'm rambling, and it's Saturday night and I should be in the backyard with the wife by the firepit... Have a good one folks.