Microsoft Office 2010 Debuts

UC

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) released Office 2010 last week, paving the way for a rollout to PC manufacturers, software assurance customers and volume license holders over the next several weeks. Office 2010 represents the latest iteration of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, adding improved integration with SharePoint, a new interface, and support for open document standards such as OpenDocument Format (ODF) version 1.1.

Office is increasingly becoming the center of the UC experience for Microsoft customers. Many workers spend a great deal of their day working within Office, SharePoint, and Outlook. It makes sense for Microsoft and its partners to integrate UC functionality directly into a user’s primary workspace. Microsoft continues to expand integration of its Office and UC applications, adding such items as smart tags to identify a username within a document and instantly display his or her presence status, the ability to see presence information within Outlook, the ability to access SharePoint workgroups directly from within Excel, Powerpoint or Word, and new social computing capabilities available in Outlook.

The latest release of Office creates the potential for further complexity for IT managers, many of whom are supporting a mixed environment consisting of Office 2003, XP, 2007, Mac Office, and even Google Apps. Nemertes finds few organizations that have created a comprehensive desktop strategy covering both native applications as well as emerging cloud-based Office environments such as Google and Zoho. In its latest release Microsoft touts the ability for customers to access a limited set of features for free via its Office web-based offering, but those services don’t yet integrate with on-premise presence and voice services, meaning potentially a mixed environment where only some workers have access to the full set of Microsoft collaboration tools.

The time is now to prepare for Office 2010. Create a strategy and road map to minimize interoperability issues, evaluate cloud options, and determine the impact of Office 2010 on UC plans.