Microsoft Delivers the Future of Productivity with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010
13 May, 2010 | Sydney, Australia
Microsoft Australia today announced the local availability of Microsoft Office® 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint® 2010, as well as Microsoft Visio® 2010 and Microsoft Project® 2010, for business customers. Australian organisations have joined the 90 million businesses worldwide that can now deploy the 2010 suite of products which will help customers see productivity gains and greater return on their software investments.
Tracey Fellows, Managing Director of Microsoft Australia said the new Office 2010 suite, combined with SharePoint 2010 and new Office Web Applications, has made the cloud a reality for Australian businesses.
“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will redefine how Australian businesses can use technology to save, innovate and grow.
“People are working differently and expect their software to work the way they do. The 2010 products reflect this generational change by delivering the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser so you can be productive wherever you are – at home, at a customer site, on an airplane or even without a PC, because you can now access your documents across a range of devices,” said Fellows.
After using Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, Australian analyst, Peter Carr, Managing Director at Longhaus, commented, “An integrated Office and SharePoint 2010 environment is much improved over 2007. It solidifies Microsoft’s undisputed office productivity dominance, and SharePoint will become the go-to standard as an aggregation portal for other major content management brands within large organisations. With improved identity management tools, as an unstructured content management portal, it certainly meets the needs of the market at this stage.”
Microsoft’s Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 beta program saw an unprecedented 8.6 million people use the Office 2010 suite prior to today’s business availability launch. This represents the largest ever beta test program for Microsoft Office and shows strong demand for innovative business productivity tools.
Australian partners are already building solutions for their customers using the 2010 set of products and as a result of the beta program there are a number of Australian early adopter customers using the suite of products to help deliver productivity gains across their businesses.
Microsoft Australia customers including the NSW Department of Education and Training, ResMed, a global leader in the development of medical products and John Holland, contracting and engineering services provider, are deploying Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in their businesses.
The NSW Department of Education and Training plan to use Office 2010 to create dynamic educational materials that will enhance teaching and learning.
Stephen Wilson, Chief Information Officer, New South Wales Department of Education and Training said, “Our goal is to build a collaborative learning community where teachers and students can preserve their learning story and showcase their achievements. An environment where millions of connections are made and shared. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will help our teachers and students build the foundation for 21st century learning.”
ResMed have been using the OneNote application in Office 2010 to improve participation across the organisation. David Lewis, Global IT Infrastructure Director, ResMed said, “The value of OneNote 2010 was a real surprise once we began using it. With Office 2010, we have the right tools in place to help the organisation deliver ongoing improvements – we now have employees from other areas asking for OneNote to be installed on their PCs.”
John Holland’s CIO, Les Oates said, “We felt Visio 2010 would be a really good fit for us. We need users to understand what the business processes are in order to do their work. Visio 2010 allows users to click on a business process within the procedure to open up the forms they require to do their work. It’s a real advantage for us.”
Oscar Trimboli, Information Worker Business Lead at Microsoft Australia said, “We’re excited to see what Australian customers are achieving with the 2010 suite of products. Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Office Web Apps are giving businesses the flexibility to develop and implement technology solutions that suit how they want to do business, rather than making their business needs work around the technology available.”
“New features in Office 2010 such as PowerPivot in Excel coupled with the content management features of SharePoint will transform the way businesses use, process and share large volumes of critical data. The co-authoring features in Word, PowerPoint and OneNote are allowing a new level of collaboration across business.”
Innovate: Productivity Solutions across the PC, Phone and Browser
With a familiar Office suite now available across the PC, phone and browser Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 together deliver new opportunities for business productivity, including:
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Connect and collaborate: The new co-authoring features in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and OneNote , combined with advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook; and the new Outlook Social Connector, which brings company communication and social network feeds directly into Outlook; ultimately gives businesses a practical and efficient collaboration tool.
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Work virtually anywhere with Office Web Applications, the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. Along with easy access to documents from virtually anywhere, Web Applications 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 browseri. Effective today, Office Mobile 2010 will be available 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 light weight 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 sitei. SharePoint intranet sites and communities also help people collaborate, regardless of location.
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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 visualisation; employees can quickly create format and deliver more compelling documents and presentations.
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Business intelligence capabilities allow businesses to quickly access data and make real time decisions using familiar Office applications to transform everyday work data into valuable information.
Save: Flexible Cloud Solutions
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are part of Microsoft’s comprehensive cloud offering. The new Office Web Apps are now available to all Office volume licensing customersii. 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.
Businesses are embracing Microsoft’s vision for the cloud, there are currently over 40 million paying customers on Microsoft Online Services. New customers continue to come on board and are choosing Microsoft Online Services for its enterprise grade capabilities, security and flexibility.
Grow: Developer and Partner Opportunities
SharePoint 2010 delivers a business collaboration platform that helps developers rapidly respond to business needs with innovative and easily-deployed solutions.
SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 provide additional features that help developers build content and collaboration applications for their customers. Developers have the choice and flexibility to write code for deployment on-premises or in the cloud with 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 organisation.
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. Gartner estimates the number of applications built on SharePoint Server will triple by 2015.
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 for the 2010 suite of products was built on SharePoint Server 2010, and reaches more than 60 countries and 26 languages worldwide. The site helps customers choose and benefit from the 2010 products, which are available for business purchase now.
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Note to editors
Additional information on Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 can be found on http://www.the2010event.com Images and logos are available for download from the Microsoft Australia News Centre: www.microsoft.com.au/newscentre.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realise their full potential. For more information about Microsoft Australia please visit www.microsoft.com.au.
For further information or to arrange an interview, please contact:
Rudolf Wagenaar
Howorth
[email protected]
(02) 8281 3879
Alice Ridgway
Howorth
[email protected]
(02) 8281 3833
Tags: Office, SharePoint, Office Web Apps, Launch
