Office 2010 (O2010) is released to technical preview at WPC09, with all attendees to receive an invitation to download and evaluate the product. With this in mind, Stephen Elop, president, Microsoft Business Division, did a presentation encompassing this and other developments in Office Communications Server (OCS) and Sharepoint Server.
Elsop said that Microsoft would make “fewer and bigger bets” in light of current market conditions. Areas of focus for the Business Division included ERP, despite describing the ERP market as “tough, but still an opportunity”.
Business intelligence too was returned high on the list CIO priorities, according to research conducted by Gartner, and Elsop said that Microsoft was endeavouring to server those needs with O2010 and other business products.
Elsop demonstrated how Dynamics CRM could be used as a marketing portal for Twitter. There were built in reports to gauge sentiment, showing the number of negative, neutral or positive messages being posted with respect to the campaigns underway. He said that this feature was now available for download to the assembled partners. Indeed, in demonstrating feature, the console showed the Twitter topics being discussed and WPC09 featured the OCS failure that had struck one of Elsop’s earlier efforts. Immediacy, it seems, can also breed contempt.
Elsop also emphasised Sharepoint as not only a collaboration tool, but he described it as “the way to bring social computing to enterprise”. This echoed the earlier comments from Alison Watson around wanting to make social media work for enterprise as many critics have argued that social media, as they currently stand, offer little to many businesses, but model of social computing brought inside the enterprise through similar tools could promise much.
Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president, Office Product Management Group, was then brought on stage to demonstrate some elements of O2010.
The much loathed/loved ribbon organisation of major action/option groups first seen in Office 2007 is to be extended across all O2010 applications, most notably Outlook. The efforts in 2007 to increase the 10% of features used by most users it seems is being carried forward. I must admit, it took me quite some time to get used to it, but now I am accustomed to it and benefit from it, but on occasion when I use OpenOffice 3.1 without such niceties, I find no frustration or bar to productivity.
In Excel
With Excel 2010 the status bars and colour grading is taken a step further with the Sparklines, a feature that can create a mini graph in a cell to represent trend info across multiple cells. This feature is aimed at separating some of the data noise that can emerge when a lot of complex information is compared in a single view. By allowing mini previews as it were, it gives a better comparison individually to allow the user to digest the information.
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