Software giant Microsoft is expecting a rapid adoption of its Office 2010 product which goes on release today in 14 languages, rising to 94 languages in coming months.
Microsoft today announced the global 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, organisations will save, innovate and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone and browser.”
Study of Microsoft releases
A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact of Implementing Microsoft’s Integrated Office Productivity Platform, May 2010, evaluated the 2010 releases of Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
The Forrester TEI model employs four fundamental elements including costs, benefits to the entire organisation, flexibility and risk. Based on the customer interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework for a composite organisation and found the ROI to be 301pc with a payback period of 7.4 months after deployment.
The study also found that the composite organisation would see more than $13m in savings over a three-year period and on average, a savings of more than two work weeks per year.
Microsoft’s Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 beta programs were the largest ever, with three times the number of participants compared with the Office 2007 beta program. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products.
“We evaluated a number of competitive options in our recent technology assessment, and chose Microsoft Office 2010 as our new desktop productivity standard,” said Mark Mastrianni, manager, global technology licensing and acquisition for GE.
“This platform will continue to position GE on the leading edge of technology and provide a clear road map that supports our business priorities in the coming years. Office 2010’s familiar, easy-to-use interface — coupled with its new tools that will enable better collaboration and drive improved efficiency and productivity for our employees and customers — made this selection the right decision for our company.”
Productivity across the PC, phone and browser
With a familiar productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser, Office 2010 and related products deliver new capabilities to help people:
Connect and collaborate with co-authoring in Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft OneNote; advanced email management and calendaring capabilities in Microsoft Outlook; and the addition of the new Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, which brings communication history and social network feeds directly into Outlook.
Work virtually anywhere with Microsoft Office Web Apps, the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and OneNote. Along with easy access to documents from virtually anywhere, Web Apps help preserve the look and feel of a document regardless of device, so content and format are generally preserved while moving between the PC, phone and browser.
Office Mobile 2010 will be available for free via Windows Phone Marketplace for all Windows Mobile 6.5 phones with a previous version of Office Mobile. People using Office Mobile 2010 can perform lightweight editing of Office documents and take notes on the go.
Help bring ideas to life with video, text and image editing, new broadcast capabilities in PowerPoint, auto-previewing in Word, easy document preparation through the new Microsoft Office Backstage view, and new Sparklines in Excel for precise trend and data visualisation.
Quickly access data to make real-time decisions using the business intelligence capabilities in familiar Office applications that transform everyday work data into valuable information.
Enter the cloud
Microsoft’s signature productivity technologies are available in the cloud, offering unprecedented choice and flexibility for IT departments when purchasing and deploying solutions.
Office Web Apps will now be available to all Office volume licensing customers. In addition, customers will be able to purchase a subscription to Office Web Apps as part of Microsoft Online Services, Microsoft’s cloud-based applications.
With more than 40 million paying customers on Microsoft Online Services, businesses are embracing Microsoft’s vision for the cloud. New customers including Kraft Foods, Novartis International and Codelco, the largest mining company in the world, are choosing Microsoft Online Services for its ability to delight end users while delivering enterprise-grade capabilities, security and flexibility.
“We chose Microsoft Online Services for our collaboration applications in the cloud for our 100,000 employees around the world,” said Leon V Schumacher, Group CIO of Novartis.
“It will enable our large research and development population to better collaborate to innovate. We can trust Microsoft to provide the enterprise capabilities our company requires to further improve personal productivity and collaboration among our associates so we can focus on our core mission — improving the lives of patients worldwide.”
By John Kennedy
Photo: Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 has been designed for the worker on the move
