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.”
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
organization, flexibility and risk. Based on the customer interviews,
Forrester constructed a TEI framework for a composite organization and
found the ROI to be 301 percent with a payback period of 7.4 months
after deployment. The study also found that the composite organization
would see more than $13 million 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 Solutions
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 e-mail 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. Effective today, 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. With Office Mobile, people can work with Office
documents stored on their phone, attached to an e-mail, and can browse,
edit, and update documents stored on a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 site.
SharePoint intranet sites and communities also help people collaborate,
regardless of location. -
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 visualization. -
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.
Flexible Cloud Solutions
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.”
Developer and Partner Opportunities
SharePoint 2010 delivers the business collaboration
platform for the enterprise and Internet, enabling developers to
rapidly respond to business needs with custom applications and
solutions.
SharePoint 2010 delivers on the
promise of flexible deployment options: Use Sandboxed Solutions to limit
code central processing unit time, Microsoft SQL Server execution time,
and exception handling. Plus, use these same technologies to deploy
custom code to SharePoint Online.
Through
design integration with Visual Studio 2010, developers can use familiar
application development tools to create, package and debug SharePoint
solutions. It also includes rich application programming interfaces and
support for Open XML, Microsoft Silverlight, Representational State
Transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), which help
developers build applications quickly. Developers can also build
applications that connect to line-of-business data, use custom
workflows, and provide business intelligence data and dashboards to an
entire organization.
The SharePoint
integration services opportunity for Microsoft partners and developers
today is $5.6 billion and is expected to grow to $6.7 billion in 2011,
according to Microsoft data.
Availability
Available today in 14 languages,
over the course of the next few months, Office 2010 and related products
will eventually be available in 94 languages.
