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Microsoft Office 2010 for business

Posted on 14 Jun 2010 at 12:40

There are now yet more reasons for businesses of all sizes to embrace the Office system in its entirety

Office 2010 carries on much of the good work of 2007 when it comes to increasing the amount of work you thrash from your employees. Compared to Google Docs, OpenOffice or indeed any Microsoft Office rival, nothing comes close to the tools on offer to create professional-looking documents quickly - and that should be the chief reason any business decides to invest.

If you're already using Office 2007 and are signed up to Microsoft's Volume Licence schemes then the decision to upgrade becomes when - not if. Your users should need little if any training, and the hardware requirements are no higher than before. Now it's so much easier to customise the Ribbon for your business, and roll out customisations across a department or company, few hurdles stand in your way.

Time to deploy

To help overcome the obstacles that do exist, especially for users of Office 2003 or earlier, Microsoft supplies the Office Environment Assessment Tool. This helps assess what Office applications and add-ins you have. It can be run individually on each workstation or automated to scan every computer in a department or company, while its centralised reporting means you get a single report or Excel workbook to analyse the results.

You should also check in-house code using the Compatibility Inspector. This comes in two versions, one for VBA in Office documents and templates, and one for Visual Studio. Both scan your code, highlight lines that may cause problems in Office 2010, and provide guidance on how to correct the problem. It's especially useful if you need to ensure code will work with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office.

Unless you have only two computers to manage, you really don't want to take the DVD round to each computer in turn to install Office 2010 manually. At the bare minimum you should be copying the contents of the DVD to a network folder, but this is hardly elegant.

You can use a startup script to deploy Office 2010 automatically the next time a computer boots. This is a cheap option, needing only Notepad and a working knowledge of group policies. You edit the sample script to point to the network folder where you put your installation files, and the config file where you set the installation options, and then add that script to a group policy object you assign to the computers on which you want to install Office.

The SharePoint advantage

The Office apps alone aren't the whole story. If you want to take advantage of the full business benefits then you'll need a supporting infrastructure, and to do that you need SharePoint. This now sports the same ribbon interface as the Office applications and it's more flexible and powerful than ever.

SharePoint builds websites. These are usually internal, such as departmental or company-wide intranets, but it can also be used to construct great extranets for providing information to or collaborating with partner companies. It can even be used for big, public, customer-facing websites, and many international companies do just this - huge names such as Kraft and Ferrari are just two examples.

SharePoint 2010 runs on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 (only the 64-bit versions) and stores its data in Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008 or 2008 R2 (again, it must be the 64-bit version). It will even use the free SQL Server Express edition, but if you want a SharePoint database bigger than the 4GB limit of SQL Server Express, you'll need to buy SQL Server Workgroup, Standard or Enterprise edition.

New this year is a basic free version, dubbed SharePoint Foundation. This includes many not-so-basic features you might think would be reserved for its paid-for big brother, including document libraries, team workspaces, blogs and wikis. You can also add the Office Web Apps to SharePoint Foundation so you can preview and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents in a browser, without having to open the document in the full desktop application.

On the other side is SharePoint Server and, if you buy this, you also need either Standard or Enterprise client access licences (CALs) for all users. The Standard CAL enables the core capabilities, including My Site personal pages for all staff. To the user, their My Site lists items such as recent documents and what colleagues are working on.