Microsoft Office 2010 – Future of productivity

Microsoft Corp. has 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. Click here to download the Office Home and Business 2010 beta

With a familiar productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser, Office 2010 and related products will deliver many new and improved 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.

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.