Stephen Elop, Chris Capossela: Business Office 2010 Launch

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming to the stage, the President of Microsoft Business Division, Mr. Stephen Elop. (Applause.)

STEPHEN ELOP: Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you, and welcome, welcome. This is just an incredible opportunity for us to all be here in New York City, and Wolfie (ph.), thank you very much for doing something a bit non-traditional in terms of coming up on stage and sharing your story with us.

This is an incredibly important day for Microsoft, and it is, for me, the first major product launch in which I’ve been involved, which just makes it a particularly special personal experience.

Everyone told me that I had not lived at Microsoft until I had experienced the excitement of an Office launch, and I’ve got to tell you, they were right. It’s just a great time. And it is my pleasure to share that experience with all of you.

In addition to this live audience here today, we have customers and partners around the world who are being delivered this experience, powered entirely by Office and SharePoint 2010. Right now, we’re reaching 66 countries, we’re delivering live real-time translation in eight languages. It’s just an amazing example of how we’re taking advantage of our technology to move this message out and to do this on a virtual basis.

Now, as we just heard from Wolfie and as we are hearing from customers from around the world, this is, indeed, a moment of fundamental change. It’s a remarkable time for businesses. And there’s a lot of reasons for that, and we’re all familiar with some of these. For example, organizations, they’re adjusting to the new economic realities. A lot has changed. Tighter budgets, stricter requirements for demonstrable return on investment. These are the types of things we’re hearing from our customers.

And there are other changes. For example, our customers are responding to the changing face of the workforce, reflecting the arrival of the millennial generation, the blending of this new generation of people who communicate in different ways from many of us and figuring out how to blend those people into the workforce. And, of course, the need for IT to supply applications that facilitate effective collaboration with individuals, teams, and organizations, regardless of their location. These phenomena have significant implications for all of us.

For example, our employees expect the same types of technologies they have at home in the workplace. That’s what they’re looking for. And whether it’s their PC or phone or whether they’re browsing the Internet, whatever they may be doing, they want their technologies to be safe. They want their technologies to be secure. And of course, they want all of those technologies to work very well and seamlessly together.

Employees also want more options for mobile work. According to IDC, the world’s mobile worker population will pass the 1 billion mark this year, and grow to nearly 1.2 billion people by 2013. That’s more than a third of the world’s work force that will be interacting with their businesses largely in a mobile way.

These same employees want access to social networking capabilities, their Facebook and LinkedIn sites, their Twitter accounts. Take KPN as an example where over 80 percent of the employees at KPN utilize social networking tools for professional networking both inside the organization as well as outside. So, these are major trends that are affecting us.

Employees around the world, all of us, you know, we’re looking for ways to find a way for IT to help people deal with the just huge sea of information that’s flooding us these days as well. We’re trying to figure out how do we deal with all of this.

There have been some surveys done and some analysis of this, and it looks like roughly 40 percent of the average U.S. worker’s day is spent just culling through and amassing and getting the data and not actually spending time adding value to it. There’s a huge inefficiency in what we’re doing today.

This workplace environment and all of these changes impacting businesses today represent a challenge, or as Wolfie said, an opportunity for all of us. An opportunity to invest in IT to improve business efficiencies.

Within the context of this generational change, I am personally very excited, deeply proud, and profoundly moved to announce today Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio, and Project 2010 now available for purchase by businesses customers all over the world. Today is the day. So, we’re just so thrilled with that news, thank you. (Applause.)

Now, I get asked a lot of questions from the press, you know, what are customers saying? What’s the adoption look like? And all of that. Well, already, 8.6 million people – 8.6 million people are using the 2010 set of products through participation in our beta program. That is more than three times as many people that engaged in the Office 2007 beta program. So, just a huge pickup today.

And today, more than 90 million business customers will gain access to the next generation in productivity applications. So, we’re very excited about the momentum we see.

Now, these businesses that are deploying the 2010 set of products can expect to see significant gains in productivity, reduced costs, and a great return on their software investments. Indeed, today, Forrester is publishing a series of commissioned studies where they really look closely at the early adopters of this technology.

They used interviews with customers who are using Office, SharePoint, and Exchange 2010 to assess the economic impact of these products. And they found a bunch of really amazing things. For example, they found that by deploying the 2010 set of products, a representative company would see an improvement in productivity which translates into time savings of more than two work weeks per person per year for everyone in their organization. By moving from Office 2007 up to Office 2010, two weeks per person per year.

According to the same study, a representative company can expect to save $13.8 million over three years through improved worker productivity, reduced travel expenses, and enhanced business intelligence capabilities, and a whole variety of other benefits.

Now, this same representative organization can expect to receive a 300 percent return on investment over a three-year period. And if you turn that math around, that means that the investment required to move from 2007 to Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 can achieve a payback on that investment in just seven and a half months. It is this value, this ROI, these cost savings, these productivity gains that are already driving the excitement around the adoption of the 2010 products.

Now, throughout today’s conversation, you’ll hear from a wide variety of customers and partners who are embracing the future of productivity and betting on the 2010 set of products to help their organizations save, innovate, and grow. And you saw Wolfie already come on stage once to do this. What I’d like to do is welcome Wolfie and several other customers on stage to join us to talk a little bit about how 2010 is impacting their environment. Come out on stage. (Applause.)

Thank you, please, have a seat. So, thank you for joining us again, and thank you, everyone, for joining us here on stage. What we thought it might be helpful to do is to get a few introductions made in terms of where you’re coming from and sort of your perspective on this. So, Steven, why don’t we start with you and we’ll work down the row.

STEVEN WILSON: Sure, Stephen. My name is Steven Wilson. I’m the chief information officer for the New South Wales Department of Education and Training in Australia. We have 1.3 million students, about 90,000 employees, and over 2,400 individual locations.

DAVID GLENN: My name is David Glenn, I’m the director of IT enterprise operations for Del Monte Foods. And Del Monte Foods is one of the most recognizable consumer product companies out there. I’m sure everybody out here has some type of a Del Monte product in their kitchen at home, or has a Milk Bone or Meaty Bone or Kibbles ‘n’ Bits product in their cabinet. Absolutely.

STEPHEN ELOP: And Mark.

MARK MASTRIANNI: Great, I’m Mark Mastrianni I’m manager of global technology acquisition and licensing for General Electric Company. GE is an innovative technology and services company. We have a wide range of businesses, our infrastructure businesses range from aviation, oil and gas, through water businesses. And we also have a capital finance business serving both consumers and businesses.

And, you know, GE is engaged in addressing, through its businesses, some of the world’s biggest and most challenging problems, including in areas of healthcare, renewable energy, and transportation.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good. Now, we’ve already heard from Wolfie about some of the challenges she encountered as she embarked on the journey to reinvent elements of IT within KPN, to reinvest and so forth. I think it might be helpful, you know, for the other three if you could each provide some background on your business, the environment, and was there a specify challenge or opportunity, an inflection point, perhaps, that caused you to reassess your approach to it? Mark, we’ll start with you.

MARK MASTRIANNI: Yeah, you know, Stephen, I mean, we’ve seen a huge – in just the last several years, just a huge influence of consumer technologies on what traditionally has been IT. And consumers are used to immediacy, they’re used to intuitiveness, and highly mobile and interactive capabilities. And those expectations trickle into the work environment, and they’re looking for the same capabilities there.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good. David?

DAVID GLENN: You know, Del Monte Foods, just the same as Microsoft, it’s a consumer products company. And for us, it’s all about speed to market. Speed to market for our Del Monte products to the consumer, and also speed to market for the IT solutions that we offer to our customers, which is the end users. And I will tell you, just the little movement of the ribbon from Office 2007 over to Office 2010 and now into SharePoint 2010 is a huge benefit for us because it reduces the learning curve now that we have with our users getting up to speed with the new 2010 product.

STEPHEN ELOP: Absolutely. Steven.

STEVEN WILSON: We’re a government organization, although some of the challenges that I’ve just heard are very similar in the government sphere. We recognized a few years ago that our students weren’t as engaged as they might be.

STEPHEN ELOP: Students were not as engaged as they might be.

STEVEN WILSON: Were not as engaged as they might be in the use of technology in learning. They were learning about technology, they were not learning with technology. So, what we did is we decided deliberately to build a collaborative learning community using the latest technologies.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very cool. Very cool. So, I’d be interested to hear how your employees, your customers, or in your case, Steven, your students are impacted by these new business and social environments that we’re seeing. Steven, we’ll start back with you.

STEVEN WILSON: Well, as I’ve said, I think we see social applications are where students really do live when they’re outside of school. They come to school, and then it’s a complete different scenario for them. So, our strategy was to dramatically increase the numbers of devices that we have at school and build a collaborative community, as I’ve stated.

And I think it shows that the consumerization of IT is a reality. It’s here with us right now.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good, David.

DAVID GLENN: You know, it’s interesting hearing Steven talk about this, you know, we’re starting to see some of the effects of his efforts, you know, with the big need with everybody’s use of social computing, social networking out there. When those folks come into our workplace, they’re looking for the same capabilities and same tool sets within the workplace.

STEPHEN ELOP: Yes.

DAVID GLENN: And we have a challenge to be able to provide that to them to also, again, help them be as productive as they can be.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good. And, Mark.

MARK MASTRIANNI: Well, you know, again, GE is a highly innovative company. Our employees have an evolving set of expectations. They’re looking for ways to share information faster and in a collaborative manner. And those consumer technologies are great technologies, we need to be agile and look at them. But at the same time, we’re involved in a number of highly regulated businesses – aviation, healthcare, consumer finance being three examples. And so at the same time, we’ve got to strike the right balance and be sure that data privacy and security requirements are met as well. And, consequently, some of the consumer technologies are not as focused on security or data privacy as would be required under regulatory —

STEPHEN ELOP: Striking the right balance in the context of the business or the enterprise.

MARK MASTRIANNI: That’s right.

STEPHEN ELOP: So now you’ve each made decisions to deploy Office 2010 and/or SharePoint 2010. And I’d like you to share just some details around your experiences. Why don’t we start with Wolfie and Mark to talk a little bit, perhaps, on the Office 2010 side, then we’ll come back to SharePoint. So, Wolfie.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: Well, I use PowerPoint a lot. And bearing in mind, I come from PowerPoint 2003 and moving up to 2010, it saves me, I think, about nearly an hour per presentation. It’s amazing the time.

STEPHEN ELOP: That’s great.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: Another thing is we use mail a lot and we use Outlook a lot. And the communications pane is really a neat overview to have your entire conversations ready. And the search capability in Outlook now is dramatically improved, and that saves me so much time.

STEPHEN ELOP: No, that’s great. Great. Mark?

MARK MASTRIANNI: Yeah, you know, I would echo what Wolfie said around particularly PowerPoint. I’m a heavy user and many of my colleagues are. But we were involved in the beta for some time with Microsoft, and I will say that our finance colleagues using Excel have been absolutely excited about the improved capacity on Excel, sparklines, the ability to embed small graphical elements. And, as well, the new capabilities with slicers to take pivot data and filter and segment it. So, a lot of excitement around just that one area.

STEPHEN ELOP: Oh, very good. So, David an Steven, let’s just pivot a little bit on SharePoint and some of the other products. David?

DAVID GLENN: Sure, absolutely. I mean, with us, you know, just like any other corporation out there, cost is a consideration and a concern for us. We have to do everything we can to keep our costs down and within our budget that we have. And I mentioned earlier about the movement of the ribbon over into SharePoint 2010.

With the work that we have to do with third parties, we do a lot of work with third parties out there, a lot of work with brokers and folks outside of the Del Monte community. Having a tool set like with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 and the ease of use by, again, moving that ribbon over, has been a tremendous help for us.

In addition to that, you have advanced federation capabilities now that came out with the new federation enhancements, and also we’re securing all that on the back end now with Forefront 2010. So, it’s a great marriage.

STEPHEN ELOP: Yeah. And it is the case today that as well, we’re announcing that Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint is out there, as is Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, both landing today as well in concert with these other releases.

Steven?

STEVEN WILSON: Yes. We’ve made a decision in the past we had 2,500-odd variants, every school, every college did what they wanted to do. We’ve now decided to build a collaborative community, as I said on the back of SharePoint 2010 and the Office 2010 products.

For us, OneNote is just the killer application. I don’t know how many of you have seen OneNote, but in education, it is just brilliant. Teachers have really taken to it, students have really taken to it. And it’s the synchronous editing of documents all in one document that’s really important and also the Web apps and the presence of the Web apps and being able to work at home, at school, anyplace, anytime is terribly important.

We’re building an e-backpack, we call it, which is our shared environment. If you picture a backpack with an electronic version where students will be able to share their files with each other, collaborate, receive homework and post homework back into their teacher. And we believe that what we will end up with is many millions and millions of connections and interactions on a weekly basis where students will preserve their learning journey and showcase their achievements.

SharePoint 2010, it brings it all together for us. Integrates to the back end, integrates to our Active Directory, provides us security, and we’re building an environment. I’m not sure I’ve got that point across, but it’s huge. We have 1.3 million students, teachers, parents, and the broader community.

STEPHEN ELOP: Who will all be interacting together in that SharePoint environment.

STEVEN WILSON: Ultimately, petabytes of data.

STEPHEN ELOP: That’s fantastic. Now, a question that’s not quite for the education community, but how have Office and SharePoint 2010 improved your ability to compete? Wolfie?

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: I can really connect with what David just said, we’re in a heavily competitive environment. And I actually want to link into something Steven said. We need to make our customers more productive and actually increase their competitiveness in order to increase our own. So, the Web apps are a perfect way for us to do that. That’s one of the things we can do.

The second thing we can do is allow our work force to actually collaborate a lot more, increasing our speed. So, those are the two things, and SharePoint 2010 is a key feature in that as well.

STEPHEN ELOP: Great. Great. David?

DAVID GLENN: You know, I’d have to say, again, it would be the speed to market. Again, us getting a good productive tool set out there to our end users.

STEPHEN ELOP: Moving rapidly. Yeah.

DAVID GLENN: The reduction in the time it takes for people to get up to speed on the tool, and just some of the new, enhanced collaborative features in SharePoint.

You know, there is a new feature within the tool, co-authoring of documents.

STEPHEN ELOP: Yes.

DAVID GLENN: Allows us to have somebody on the east coast and somebody on the west cost collaborating and working on the exact same document at the same time. That’s a huge productive benefit.

STEPHEN ELOP: Without moving the e-mail messages back and forth.

DAVID GLENN: Absolutely.

STEPHEN ELOP: And getting out of synch.

DAVID GLENN: Absolutely.

STEPHEN ELOP: Great, Mark?

MARK MASTRIANNI: You know, for us, attracting, developing, and retaining great people is a business imperative. And certainly with that, having a great environment to flourish in is critical. The building you saw at the beginning of this segment was our advance manufacturing and software technology center in Michigan. This is a partnership with the State of Michigan where we’re going to be hiring over 1,300 people, primarily from the Michigan area. And we’re very excited about it. We’ll have all of our GE businesses under one roof involved in advanced information technology work, manufacturing, clean energy, transportation, a number of exciting projects. And that environment is absolutely state of the art, and certainly one of the key components in that environment are Office 2010 components.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good. Very cool. Steven, in your environment, Office and SharePoint, how are they making you be more successful?

STEVEN WILSON: Oh, and competitive in a way.

STEPHEN ELOP: Competitive.

STEVEN WILSON: I believe it’s our responsibility as educators to have our students use the same applications that they’ll ultimately use when they’re in the work force.

STEPHEN ELOP: Yes.

STEVEN WILSON: We want to educate students to be more productive in the work force. Hopefully, also, take something from that. And when students leave our system and enter the work force, some of that will bleed across and have, potentially, more engaged younger employees.

STEPHEN ELOP: That’s great. So, we all are using these products today. Early testers, obviously, all of us. So, we all have that one feature or capability or ah-hah moment associated with our product. So, I’d be interested to hear from each of you, what do you personally like the most or what are you most engaged with with Office or SharePoint 2010? The most compelling or feature or whatever that’s made a difference? Wolfie, we’ll start with you.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: I’m greedy, I’ll take two.

STEPHEN ELOP: OK. Go ahead.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: The first is Outlook now comes with a social connector. And for somebody in my job, that’s very important. So, that’s one.

STEPHEN ELOP: Connecting into Facebook and LinkedIn and My Space.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: Yeah, into everything, yeah, that’s cool. The second is – and it’s for every single thing in Office 2010 is the file tab. It’s like this little cockpit per document. It’s neat, it’s cool, I like it.

STEPHEN ELOP: Yeah, it really helps you get a sense of the document overall, how it’s going to print, all of those things.

WOLFIE VAN DIJK: Exactly.

STEPHEN ELOP: And we’ve heard a lot about that. Steven?

STEVEN WILSON: It’s easy, it’s OneNote 2010 and the ability for a lot of people to edit all at the same time. And I can give you an absolute quote here. A teacher said to me that the secret to engagement is to get constant partial attention from our students…

STEPHEN ELOP: Partial attention? (Laughter.)

STEVEN WILSON: Partial.

STEPHEN ELOP: We’re setting the bar high, I’m hoping we’ll overshoot.

STEVEN WILSON: Well, those of you who are parents, if you can get constant partial attention, you’ve won the day.

STEPHEN ELOP: Very good. David?

DAVID GLENN: Well, you know, I’m going to have to one-up Wolfie here, I’ve got three.

STEPHEN ELOP: OK, go for it.

DAVID GLENN: No, actually, I love the new integration — the enhanced integration, I should say, of all the presence capabilities that you have. If you look within Outlook, everybody’s used to now the little globe up there that shows the little status of somebody…

STEPHEN ELOP: So you know who is available to communicate with, who you can reach…

DAVID GLENN: Yeah, you take that integration, you carry that through SharePoint now, you take that, and you can pull some of the enhancements you’ve made, the My Sites, and some of the capabilities that you have now to pull organizational information and flow that through some of the new functions of Outlook 2010, it’s great.

STEPHEN ELOP: Good.

DAVID GLENN: I already mentioned the co-authoring of documents. I mean, when folks get a chance to actually see that and play with it, it will be great. And I’ll also have to throw in – I love the conversation piece within Outlook 2010 where if I get an e-mail from somebody, I can actually see the chain of other e-mails that are associated with that down in the bottom right-hand corner, so I can familiarize myself with the whole subject. Because like everybody, I get 200 e-mails a day from various different subjects, so it’s nice to have that whole conversation piece.

STEPHEN ELOP: All organized.

DAVID GLENN: Integrated right in there within the product.

STEPHEN ELOP: That makes a lot of sense. Great. Mark?

MARK MASTRIANNI: You know, mine is a very simple one. I just love the paintbrush available in every app, and for that matter, really stepping back. It’s a simple thing, I know, but for me, it’s a great productivity aid. And stepping back, it’s really the way the applications with the consistent interface work together so well.

STEPHEN ELOP: That’s great. You know, what I really like about all of these stories is that they are all different. And it really speaks to the diversity and the broad capabilities that we’re landing with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Please, a round of applause for these people from all over the world. (Applause.)

And now what we’re going to do is actually show you some of the scenarios that Wolfie, David, Mark, and Steven have been talking about. Please join me in welcoming Senior Vice President, Chris Capossela, who is going to do just a bit of a demonstration for you. Chris, welcome. (Applause.)

CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Thank you. Well, thank you, everyone, it’s really an honor to be here to present Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 to all of you today.

As Stephen mentioned, we’re very focused on making this the best productivity experience across the PC, the phone, and the browser as well as letting you have the cloud on your terms. So, everything you’re going to see me demonstrate today, you’re able to run in your own data centers using our products, or you can have Microsoft host in our data center with Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, et cetera.

So let’s jump in and take a look at the demo itself. I’m going to start off in Outlook. We’ve done a lot of work to make it much easier for you to work with other people across our technologies. And Outlook is a great place to start. Simple things like the calendar view where when I click on a calendar request, I see my calendar right there in the preview pane. So, I don’t have to switch over to the calendar to see whether or not I can make it. I can hit “accept” or “decline” right here within the preview pane, very simple.

Similarly, we integrate voicemail into your inbox. So, when someone leaves me a voicemail, I can listen to it, but new with Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010, we’ll automatically convert that voicemail to text. So, now I can just read it without having to play it. When I do a search inside of Outlook, it’ll be searching through all my voicemails as well as my e-mail. So, very, very simple, but great things for me to be able to do right here.

Notice I’ve got a lot of e-mail that I haven’t gotten to yet. I might have been away from my desk for a little while. If you look in the bottom left-hand corner, you can see I’ve got about 119 unread messages. Conversation view has been a big hit with our 8.6 million beta customers. So, when I right click and say I want to see my inbox’s conversations, watch what happens. I’m going to apply it to this folder, and we turn 119 messages really into just a handful of conversations, letting me manage conversations, instead of e-mails.

Here’s a conversation that has, it looks like, nine unread messages. Click once, and I can see that there are a lot of redundant messages here because people have replied back and forth, and I don’t need all of those. I just need the unique ones. So, we’ve added the clean-up button for me to clean up a conversation. Watch what happens to that conversation. Hit the button, and we’ll delete all of the non-unique e-mails and just leave the ones that you need to see. Very simple way to get your hands on your inbox and get control over it.

Here’s one of those run-away e-mails that has we’ll automatically convert that voicemail to text. So, now I can just read it without having to play it. When I do a search inside of Outlook, it’ll be searching through all my voicemails as well as my e-mail. So, very, very simple, but great things for me to be able to do right here.

Notice I’ve got a lot of e-mail that I haven’t gotten to yet. I might have been away from my desk for a little while. If you look in the bottom left-hand corner, you can see I’ve got about 119 unread messages. Conversation view has been a big hit with our 8.6 million beta customers. So, when I right click and say I want to see my inbox’s conversations, watch what happens. I’m going to apply it to this folder, and we turn 119 messages really into just a handful of conversations, letting me manage conversations, instead of e-mails.

Here’s a conversation that has, it looks like, nine unread messages. Click once, and I can see that there are a lot of redundant messages here because people have replied back and forth, and I don’t need all of those. I just need the unique ones. So, we’ve added the clean-up button for me to clean up a conversation. Watch what happens to that conversation. Hit the button, and we’ll delete all of the non-unique e-mails and just leave the ones that you need to see. Very simple way to get your hands on your inbox and get control over it.

Here’s one of those run-away e-mails that has 46 e-mails where people have just replied all and replied all. It’s gotten completely out of control and they’re saying please take me off this distribution list, stop replying all — we’ve all seen these. (Laughter.) So we’ve added probably the most popular feature in Outlook 2010, the ignore button. When I click ignore, it literally deletes that entire conversation and any new e-mails that I might get on that same subject. People absolutely love the ignore button in 2010. So, those are a couple quick examples.

Let me show you another one. We’ve taken things that people do again and again and again and that take many steps, and we’ve boiled them down to just very quick steps. Here’s an e-mail that has a bunch of people on it. It’s got an Excel chart, and I want to take this and I want to create a meeting with all these people and with all that text.

In the old world, that was many, many steps. In the new world with quick steps right here at the top of Outlook, I can just say I want to reply with a meeting. And with one single click, we’ll create the new meeting request, we’ll put everybody on it, and of course we’ll bring in the context, the e-mail into that meeting request. Very simple, many steps, now just a single step for you.

It also brings us to another great feature in Outlook 2010 to help you collaborate with other people, and that’s what you see at the top left of the screen, what we call mail tips. Outlook has talked to Exchange before I send the mail. And it’s telling me about the people who are on the mail. So, it tells me that one of them is outside of our company. I might not have known that, and I might not want to send this to someone outside the company.

It tells me that the distribution list is going to 270 people. Probably don’t want all of them at the meeting, that’s too many. Frank Miller, it’s showing me his out of office right there in Outlook. So, it saves you that embarrassment of sending the e-mail and then getting the bounceback and having to do something different.

So in this case, I’m just going to delete the distribution list. I can read Frank’s out of office, and it tells me that Molly Clark is on point. So, I’m going to add Molly and I’m going to take Frank off the e-mail, and now I’m ready to go off and send this. So, some very simple things to make it much easier for you to deal with Outlook – or deal with all of your e-mails.

One of the gentlemen on stage mentioned the Outlook Social Connector, and I think KPN, Wolfie loved this as well. Let me show you what this is. Outlook 2010 is the release that becomes social. Were delivering the social connector to connect Outlook to all different kinds of social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, My Space – as well as using SharePoint internally for your own social network inside the firewall.

So now this is called the yearbook view, where we give you photos of everybody on the e-mail. And people love this, particularly larger companies who don’t always know the names with the e-mails. And you get to see them right here. And we’re just pulling these from the social networks.

If I click on someone’s name or photo, Paul Cannon, click on him, and it’s going to automatically filter and show me all the e-mails that Paul and I have exchanged, all the attachments that Paul and I have exchanged. If I click on status updates, Paul’s using LinkedIn. It’s showing me the status updates he’s posted to LinkedIn right here inside of Outlook. So, I can use Outlook as my social hub. It’s not just for e-mail and calendar, but it’s also for social networking.

Click on somebody else, John Evans is actually using SharePoint as a social network inside their company. We think this will be one of the biggest excitement areas for SharePoint 2010. The biggest release we’ve ever done of SharePoint, and we think using it as a social network inside the enterprise will be one of the scenarios that customers get very excited about.

Let me show you. I click on John Evans’s name, and it automatically takes me over to his My Site. You can think about this as his Facebook site inside the enterprise. Here’s a little space where he can do a Twitter-style feed. It looks like he went to CES Europe. I can see about him inside the company and what he does. I can see the keywords that he’s sort of an expert on these topics. And then I can see recent activities. This is essentially his status feed. It looks like he’s marked certain documents with certain metadata. He’s tagged different spreadsheets, he’s tagged the blog. I can read his blog. It looks like there’s a note board here where I can post a note on his note board, similar to a wall in Facebook. It’s very, very common and simple for someone who’s used to working with Facebook to do this inside their own enterprise.

Click on the organizational browser, and now I have a nice Silverlight way to explore the company organization. There’s John. Here’s one of his peers. Here’s John’s manager. Here’s that person’s manager. And I’m just exploring the org right here. This is going to be very comfortable for anyone who’s used a social network. But we’ve done some things in Outlook to make it easy for people to sort of work their way into a social network if they’re not really used to it.

As an example, SharePoint automatically sends me an e-mail once a week where it, with my permission, has looked at all of the e-mails that I’ve sent and all of the documents that I’ve sent, and it literally looks for keywords in those documents that I use all the time, and the people that I e-mail all the time, and it suggests, hey, I think these are your colleagues. I think these are the things you’re an expert on. And with a single click, I’m updating my profile and now more people can discover me as an expert in a particular discipline that I work in. So, very, very simple, but a great example of how we can make it easier to work together.

We’ve made massive investments in search. And so search in Outlook gets a lot faster and a lot richer, but it also gets really great inside of SharePoint itself using the Fast technology.

Let me just search for sales and SharePoint will kick off the search and return lots of results for me. But one of the exciting things is that we’ve integrated expertise search. So, on the right-hand side, we’ve found people who have expertise at the particular keyword that I searched on.

On the left-hand side, SharePoint has automatically come up with a set of filters based on the results. So, now I can filter all those results by document type. I just want to see PowerPoint decks, so I’ll just click on PowerPoint decks. I just want to see them by a certain author, I can do that. When they were created? These filters are automatically created and are unique to every single search I do, and yet it makes finding information really, really easy.

Here’s a patient slide deck. Watch what happens when I click on preview. It will give you this really rich preview right here in the browser so you can make sure this is the deck you want to look at. There’s the slide I was looking for, yeah, this is the one I want, or no, it’s not, let’s just close that preview.

Somebody talked about the Office Web applications. If I want to open this up in PowerPoint in the browser, I simply click view in the browser, and here is the PowerPoint Web app, running inside of IE, Firefox, Safari – and as I click through it, it’s got the full rich content that you would expect of an Office application, whether it’s on the PC or in the browser.

So we’ve done a really nice job making you very comfortable working across the PC and the browser here.

Let me pop back to the shared document view, and let’s take a look at a little bit of the things in SharePoint itself.

Here’s that presentation we were just looking at. I’m going to quickly show you that when I select it, up comes the ribbon in SharePoint 2010, making it far easier to get at the power that’s built into SharePoint. Notice we support tagging, another key social networking feature.

So I’m going to just tag this presentation as something that I like. And when I click that, it’s literally added that tag and anybody who’s following me or has me as a colleague is going to see that status update, that I’ve marked that as something that I like.

I can add metadata to it or specific tags that I like. The No. 1 requested feature we have for SharePoint, you guys might all know it, it’s let me take my content offline. I have all these documents, I want to bring them with me on the plane, I want them on my PC so when I’m not connected to the Internet, I can use them. Sure enough, right there on the ribbon is a big button that says “synch to SharePoint Workspace.” This will take all that SharePoint content, bring it onto my PC, SharePoint Workspace is the new name for Microsoft Groove. And it ships as part of Office Pro Plus, which the vast majority of our customers buy.

So it’s just built into Office. Now you have SharePoint content offline. When I work on it on my PC and I synch back up to the network, all those changes just synch back to the SharePoint Server. We really believe offline access is incredibly important to our customers and we’re very happy to deliver it with Office 2010.

So that’s a quick look at some of the things that we’ve done as it relates to SharePoint and making it easy for you to work anywhere.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the work that we’ve done in Excel when it comes to being able to visualize your data. Here’s an inventory and pricing sheet in SharePoint that I’ve already opened up in the rich client in Microsoft Excel 2010. Notice, it’s got a bunch of pricing information and we have data bars here showing us the different numbers. Those were part of Excel 2007. But for data like this, we often see people create charts like this. This chart is very hard to read. Lots of data. You’ve got this really complex legend. Just very hard for your eye to actually match the legend to the line. So, we felt like we could do a lot better helping you visualize your data.

So right here, let me just insert what we call sparklines. I’m going to click on sparkline. I’m going to select the data I want, pricing from March to August. And I can hit OK. And right there in the cell, we draw a tiny little in-cell chart that shows me the trend of that pricing for that data.

Notice the ribbon changed. So, I can mark the high point and the low point. I can quickly use the gallery to pick something that really looks good and then of course as Excel always lets you do, you can fill down. And now that really awful chart looks like this, a nice spark line, one per row. I can really see what the data tells me over time. Very simple, but powerful way to visualize our data.

Now, this looks like a simple spreadsheet, but in fact, there’s a massive amount of data that’s feeding this spreadsheet. I’m going to click on a new tool to Excel 2010 called PowerPivot. And PowerPivot lets me work with huge data sets in memory and then work with them very quickly.

Check out the bottom left-hand side of the screen. Notice how many rows I’m working with. 1.5 million rows of data loaded into Excel right here with PowerPivot. And watch how fast I can sort and filter this. I’m going to select just four dates instead of all the dates, and we sort and filter 1.5 million rows in about half a second. Now I’m dealing with 160,000 rows of data.

Maybe I want to sort that by unit cost, done. Maybe I want to sort that by days in stock. Done. We could be working with 100 million rows of data in this data set all in memory, just like it was a couple thousand rows. It looks incredibly fast, it feels very, very performant. And that’s very exciting.

So it allows us to build BI dashboards like this one. Here’s a PowerPivot chart. It’s nothing more than a regular chart that we’re all used to. It shows things like the sum of units on hand, on order, the number of units sold across a set of products.

But on the right-hand side, you can see what we call slicers. This is one of the most compelling technologies in Excel 2010 because it allows us to create a visual dashboard of our data. Maybe I only want to see PCs from Adventure Works. Look at the chart update. Fabrikam, PC Unlimited, and a click on a few of those. Maybe I only want to see PCs with 8 gigs of RAM, 6 gigs of RAM, and 4 gigs of RAM. So, very quickly, I’m using these slicers to filter the data set I’m working with, millions and millions of rows being filtered here.

I notice that there’s no information about the warranty for these PCs as part of our dashboard. I’d love to do that. So, I’m going to analyze this pivot chart, and I’m going to add a slicer. This shows me all the different dimensions of data that live in the backend system, and I’m going to chose warranty, which happens to be at the bottom. And watch what happens. We add the warranty years right here as a new slicer. I can drag that over and maybe drop it. Excel will just drop that in for me and maybe I want to filter PCs to just show PCs that have a two-year warranty.

It looks like we have about eight different products there. And now I’ve created a new dashboard using these slicers, and I’m going to save it. And anybody who has access to this spreadsheet, whether it’s in a SharePoint Server or SharePoint Online in Microsoft cloud, when they open this up, they’re going to see this exact view with the slicers with the filters that I’ve selected. And then they’re going to be able to do their own analysis.

Customers tell us they spend a lot of money writing custom solutions that looked just like this. We can take a lot of that savings out of the equation, give it back to our customers, and allow them to build solutions that just look very, very rich, and yet are incredibly simple.

If I go back to my SharePoint library, there’s that spreadsheet. Let me go ahead and click on it and open it inside of Excel in the browser. This is the Excel Web app. I don’t have to have Excel on my machine, and there’s that exact same chart. You can see the slicers with the exact same filters that I applied.

Now that I’m here, I can continue to filter this and work on this as if I had built it myself in the rich client. So, a great experience across the PC, the phone, and the browser is what you’re seeing right here.

Let me open up a different spreadsheet, in this case, sales by country. And I’m going to choose to edit it in the browser. A second ago, we were viewing something in the browser. Now I want to edit it in the browser. And you’ll see the ribbon exists in the Web applications. If you know the rich client, you know the Web applications. Just like you know SharePoint.

Bottom right-hand corner. Can you see this? It says two people are editing the spreadsheet, right there. Someone else has opened this spreadsheet, a guy named Jim Daly, and Jim’s going to make some changes while I make some changes. I’m going to make this $100 and I’m going to make the $100 yellow. And you’ll notice as I do that, Jim is also making something yellow. He made the $7,700 change. He made that yellow. Let me go ahead and make my change a different color.

So we’re working on this at the exact same time. We can see each other, we can modify this together, and it makes it very easy to collaborate in new ways. We’ll see the spreadsheet again in just a moment.

Let me turn to another big focus area for us, and that was helping you create beautiful-looking content using rich media. The amount of photos that get posted to Facebook is staggering – billions and billions of photos every month. The amount of video that gets recorded and uploaded to You Tube, 24 hours of video per minute is uploaded to You Tube. It’s just amazing.

People want modern productivity tools that allow them to work with photos and videos. And so we’ve done a lot of work to make that possible in Office 2010. I’m going to edit this presentation in PowerPoint, and let’s take a look at some of the video work that we’ve done to make it easy for you to build really rich presentations.

I’m going to choose insert video. And now I’m going to navigate to my SharePoint digital asset library. And, again, we can filter all this data by metadata, by who’s authored it, by whatever metadata you want to track inside your company.

I’m going to pick a Windows 7 high-definition video and pop it into PowerPoint. There we go. It’s right there. Let me resize it, let me hit play. There it is, it’s playing. I can even resize it while it plays. We see this as just kind of a standard nature video. It’s about 20 seconds in length. It’s got a little bit of sound, it’s a high-def video, and sort of away we go. There we go, there’s the sound. And I’ll just let this play to the end, the 20 seconds, you’ll get a sense for it.

Now that I’ve added it, though, there’s all sorts of things that I might want to do to it. Notice the ribbon’s changed. I can just drop down the gallery and maybe I want to flip this around a little bit. Maybe I want to use a video effect like reflect it, so the video would reflect on the slide as it plays. Notice the playback tab. I might want to trim the video. 20 seconds is a long video for a presentation. So, I’m just going to maybe trim some of the horses down and that koala bear, bye-bye, see you later to the hedgehog or whatever that was. Let’s go to the seals, and let’s call it a day at about nine seconds and I’ll hit okay.

And now when I hit play, watch this reflect. Right there. Takes advantage of the graphics card that I’ve already purchased. And we’ve got the eight seconds or so that I want. Really, really rich, incredibly easy. I don’t need a third-party tool to make that happen.

Now, we’ve made it very easy to work with your files using the new backstage view. Wolfie mentioned this one. When I click on the file menu, we’ve completely modernized the file menu to make it far easier to work with your files. One of my favorite examples, people don’t even know they can compress videos that they have in PowerPoint. With the back stage view, it makes it really easy.

I’m going to choose an Internet-quality video instead of a high-def video. And automatically, we’ll take a 16-megabyte file, and in just a couple of seconds, we’ll compress that down and we’ll save 14 megs. It’s now down to a meg and a half. It’s embedded in the PowerPoint deck, it travels with me, I don’t need to keep track of a different video file.

If I want to share this, I click save and send. And I have the ability to save it to SharePoint, save it to a website, publish my slides, save it as a PDF. If I want to print it, I have the ability to get a beautiful print preview so I have a great understanding of what I’m going to see. I’m not printing in color, I’m going to print on gray scale. So, what does my slide deck look like? I just click gray scale and I see it.

I don’t want one slide per page, I want four. I do this all from the backstage view. I’m not drilling down into dialogue box after dialogue box and then drilling back out. Very, very simple. Anybody, and everybody, will get the benefits of working in this way.

I mentioned that working with others and sharing with other people was a key design goal for Office 2010. PowerPoint introduces one of the most popular features we’ve seen on the beta, and that’s broadcasting your slide shows over the Internet.

We’ve added this button right here to broadcast. Now anybody — I’ll click “start broadcast.” Anybody with an Internet connection and a browser can participate in my slide show. I can copy this unique URL, which we generate every time you click broadcast, or I can send it in e-mail to somebody else. In this case, I’m going to send it off to Jim Daly and hit the send button. And now watch this, when I start my slide show, it shows up in PowerPoint, as I’d expect. I’ll go ahead and use the Windows 7 snap feature to snap PowerPoint on the left-hand side, and I’m going to pretend like I’m a different user using the browser, and I’m going to snap the browser to the right-hand side, and I’m just going to paste in that URL. And sure enough, it brings up PowerPoint in the browser.

So on the left, I’m broadcasting from PowerPoint to rich client, and on the right, I could be using Safari on the Mac, Firefox, IE, whatever. When I click to advance my slides as the presenter, everybody who’s watching along in the browser gets to see that broadcast over the Internet live, sort of real time as we’re doing it. So, very simple to share your presentation across the PC and the browser. Now let’s take a look at the phone.

I mentioned we were talking about PC, phone, and browser, the three devices we think just about everyone wants to use. I’m excited to announce that today, the Office Mobile Applications are available for Windows Mobile 6.5. You can go up the marketplace and download them, they’re done. But I’d love to show you a Windows Phone 7 device and show you what Office looks like on this device.

So that’s what I have right here. And you see I have a cable connected to the device and so you can see on the big screen what I’m actually seeing right here. So, I’m going to check my e-mail, just by clicking the e-mail button, you can follow along on the screen.

I’m going to refresh my e-mail, and that shows me the mail that I just sent. I’m going to click on that. Sure enough, there’s the URL. Click on the URL, and now I’m going to flip it into landscape mode, and you can see that slide being broadcast. On the big screen, we’re actually going to show you the PC, the phone, and the browser all at the same time and now I’m going to click in PowerPoint and sure enough, you see it update across the PC, phone, and browser.

We’re very, very excited about delivering these types of capabilities to end users around the world because we think it’s a new level of productivity.

Let’s take another look at some of the things on the phone, if we can switch back and bring that back on the big screen.

I’m going to hit the Windows button. One of the things that we’re really excited about is the Office hub, which is built into Windows Phone 7 devices. I’ll click on Office, and sure enough, I see OneNote. Taking notes on your phone is becoming a very common scenario. So, having a rich note-taking application right on the phone is something we’re excited about. I swipe to the left, and I have the ability to create Excel and World and PowerPoint documents.

I swipe to the left again, and we’ve connected this phone to our SharePoint infrastructure. So, I’m already connected to that exact same document library that I’ve been working on for the past 15 minutes or so. There are all those same documents we were working on.

When I click on sales by country, it’ll open up the document that’s actually on the phone, and it’ll check to see if there’s a new version on the server. I say, yes, I want to see the new version. And this is the one that me and the other person were working on together. I scroll over, you can see the green and the yellow. Those are the updates we made five or six — whatever, ten seconds ago on the PC and the browser.

So 20 minutes, super fast run-through of a whole bunch of different capabilities. I hope you get the notion that we really strive to build the best productivity experience on the PC, the phone, and the browser, and to deliver the cloud on your terms. You can run all this technology yourself, or you can have Microsoft run it on your behalf through Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. With that, thank you very much. (Applause.)

STEPHEN ELOP: That’s great, thank you, Chris. As our customers described and as Chris just demonstrated, the productivity solutions delivered in the 2010 release of Office and SharePoint will help our customers, end users and IT professionals alike to save, to innovate, and to grow. As Chris just said, we deliver the best productivity experience across the PC, the phone and the browser.

We deliver cloud productivity on your terms. You can do these things on premises or in the cloud or a combination of both, on your terms. And we provide developers a platform to build unique, innovative solutions.

Now, as has been our strategy for the past 30 years, Microsoft continues to be deliberately dependent on our partners to meet the specific needs of industries and the individual professionals within those industries. This continues to be the case with this release of the 2010 set of products.

Our partners have been very active in providing feedback during every phase of development, and they’ve spent months preparing for the availability of these products in the marketplace. As of today, our teams have trained 50,000 partner employees across 60 countries on Office 2010 and over 34,000 partner employees have been trained and are ready on SharePoint 2010. These extensive preparations are already helping to drive deployment and adoption with customers all around the globe.

Now, more so than ever before, this release represents significant opportunities for that developer community. Developers can quickly build applications for Office and SharePoint 2010, benefiting from the natural way these products work with our development tools like Visual Studio 2010.

According to Gartner, the number of applications built on SharePoint will triple by 2015. Already, there are more than 300 independent software vendors building SharePoint 2010 solutions. This is expected to increase to more than 1,200 in the next year alone.

In addition, the ecosystem, all-up, around SharePoint is growing rapidly. Today, the services opportunity around SharePoint for our partners is measured at roughly $5.6 billion, that’s money to them, working with our environment, and that is projected to grow to $6.7 billion by 2012. There has never been a better time to build on Office and SharePoint as a platform.

And what we’d like to do right now is show you a video that celebrates some of what our top partners are saying about this opportunity.

(Break for partner video presentation.)

STEPHEN ELOP: Some really good stuff being done by our partners, we’re really pleased by that. Just a taste of the enthusiasm from literally tens of thousands of Microsoft partners around the world.

Now, as we’ve heard today from General Electric, KPN, Del Monte, the New South Wales Department of Education, as well as from many of our partners, the 2010 family of products represent an epic release for all of you.

You know, I have the unique privilege to meet with you, our customers, from all over the world. In those conversations, the most useful thing I get to do is to simply listen. Listen to your hopes, your aspirations, and for how you see the future. And then as craftsmen, we build the solutions. We build the solutions that not only meet your hopes and aspirations, but we pleasantly surprise and delight you along the way in unexpected ways, to take advantage of these generational moments that define the technology industry.

We are very proud to call Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 our own. They define our collective future. And I am, as an individual, absolutely honored to experience this generational moment with our Microsoft team members all over the world, and all of you. Welcome to the future of productivity, welcome to 2010. Thank you for your attendance today. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

END