Will Office 2010 rescue Microsoft’s ubiquitous productivity suite in the same way that Windows 7 resuscitated the reputation of Windows?
That’s the billion-dollar question. And [with] the official unveiling of Office 2010, answers begin to emerge.
Boasting a host of collaborative features, interface improvements, and seamless integration with the new, free Office 2010 Web Apps, Office 2010 is Microsoft’s best attempt to redress the complaints that users had about Office 2007 while not throwing out the 2007 experiment entirely.
At the same time, with Office 2010 Microsoft attempts to fend off the advances of Google with its free, web-based Google Docs — viewed by some as a legitimate threat to the desktop-based application model. There’s no doubt that the challenges for Office 2010 were great. Here is an overview of the result.
Collaboration
With Office 2010, Microsoft hopes to lure back lucrative corporate customers, who largely took a pass on Office 2007, with enhancements that take collaboration and mobility to a new level. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel now allow co-authoring a document in real-time, for instance.
Rather than being locked out of a document when it’s open on someone else’s computer, you’ll see a tiny “toast” icon in the status bar, indicating that the document is being worked on, and a pop-up will tell you who else is reviewing the document. Gone are lockouts and confusing “merge” messages resulting from others having edited a document you need to update.
To get this level of collaboration, though, you’ll have to employ one of two technologies: SharePoint 2010, which Microsoft released concurrently this week with Office 2010, or SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com), the free online storage space offered on Windows Live, Microsoft’s set of online services and applications that’s largely aimed at individuals.
Many companies that have deployed Office have adopted SharePoint, the document storage and management tool, so Microsoft hopes to…