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Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Offer New Tools for Businesses
by Nicholas Kolakowski
Office 2010 applications, including Excel (seen here), utilize not only the Ribbon to access commands, but also Microsoft Office Backstage, which centralizes tasks such as share, save, print and publish.
Office 2010 offers customizable themes and graphic layouts, along with upgraded picture-formatting tools, to make presentations and documents more multimedia.
Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote users can edit a file at the same time as other people, remotely.
PowerPivot allows for the creation of user-generated BI solutions, allowing businesses to leverage Excel tools to drill down into massive amounts of data.
Office 2010 introduces additional features to PowerPoint, seen here with Microsoft Office Backstage.
PowerPoint's Broadcast Slide Show allows presentations to be shared through a Web browser.
Visio 2010 allows the creation of data-driven visuals, with 66 preset templates, which refresh as new information becomes available.
Outlook 2010 allows users to manage e-mails from multiple mailboxes, customize common tasks into single-click commands and use picture-editing and graphics tools to create more colorful messages.
Outlook 2010's calendar feature lets users e-mail their calendar to others, in order to schedule, and offers a streamlined Schedule View.
SharePoint 2010's new capabilities include the ability to connect to Web services and line-of-business data in the Office 2010 client.
SharePoint 2010 dashboard.
SharePoint 2010 profiles display not only an organization member's basic information, but also their social tags, status updates and related documents.
SharePoint 2010 integrates with Office in a number of ways, including social tagging and document life-cycle management.
SharePoint 2010 Document Center, where documents can be accessed and managed through the cloud.
SharePoint 2010 allows users to share and interact with data, all the better to create in-depth reports.
Outlook Social Connector bakes social networking information, contact information and communications history into Outlook. Microsoft partnered with companies such as LinkedIn to port their data into the feature.
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Microsoft releases another flagship software platform, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, to businesses on May 12. Regular customers will be able to purchase the software in June. While Microsoft continues to own the lion's share of the productivity-software business, it faces new challenges from cloud-based productivity software such as Google Apps. To combat that threat, Office 2010 not only includes a stripped-down, free Web component (accessible to Windows Live subscribers) but a variety of new features designed to make its applications more powerful and essential. In addition to a wide range of minor tweaks, Office 2010 includes major end-user adjustments such as customizable themes and graphics for creating colorful documents, Microsoft Office Backstage for streamlining many commands, and the ability to leverage user-generated BI solutions. Some businesses may be giving cloud-based productivity a serious look, but Microsoft is hoping that this new offering will show that desktop-based software is still king. For now.