Microsoft Delivers the Future of Productivity With Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

NEW YORK, May 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Today, 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.

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"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,(1) 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,(2) 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, (3) 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.

Microsoft's global launch website http://www.the2010event.com for the 2010 suite of products was built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010, reaching more than 60 countries and 26 languages worldwide. The site includes a rich set of content that will help customers choose and benefit from the 2010 products, which are available for business purchase now.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

(1) "The Total Economic Impact ™ of Implementing Microsoft's Integrated Productivity Platform" is a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft in May 2010. The study evaluated Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Based on interviews with early adopter customers, Forrester constructed a TEI framework for a composite organization and the associated ROI analysis illustrating the financial impact areas.

(2) An appropriate device, Internet connection and supported browser are required. Some mobile functionality requires Office Mobile 2010, which is not included in Office 2010 applications, suites or Web Apps. There are some differences between the features of the Office Web Apps, Office Mobile 2010 and the Office 2010 applications.

(3) Cloud services may have different features than installed software.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.