As the Chancellor confirmed in the March Budget, the UK economy has so far shrunk by an unprecedented 6 per cent in the current downturn– but we still seem to be in the earliest days of any kind of bounce-back. Uncertainty is the name of the game for all business leaders.

Against this background, any capital expenditure that cannot demonstrate a positive impact on either hard sales or reduced operational expenditure just has to be rejected. Yet, while technological conservatism definitely has a place, it can be overdone. Businesses are 100 per cent justified in looking to sweat existing assets for as long as they can, but where competitive advantage in a tough market can be gained through smart deployment of IT, it’s an investment that ought to be made. This is the claim for Microsoft® Office 2010; the latest version of Microsoft’s global best-selling productivity software.

Any new product, from the latest photocopier to a new car, will lead off with a list of great features and functions. And yes, Office 2010 has plenty. Office is also central to the world of businesses today – thanks to its massive success and ubiquity – which makes for an easy learning curve for staff. Yet neither of these reasons make Office 2010 an essential purchase.

What makes Office 2010 a compelling investment is its seamless alignment to line-of-business requirements. Office 2010 has been set to up to link better to the central business-shaping applications used as the powerhouses of so many companies today: the Microsoft SharePoint® collaboration platform; the Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 R2 back end database engine; and the Internet at large. Office 2010’s infinite connectivity promotes:

• Shared use of information across teams and departments

• Improved data extraction, manipulation and interpretation

• Real-time knowledge transfer for true business agility

• Familiar desktop interfaces to even the deepest ERP, CRM and business intelligence systems

• Every employee in every business function getting the satisfying IT experience they demand

“Real business value in terms of productivity and functionality, fit for the kinds of tasks business users ask of their communications and collaboration technologies, is what Office 2010 is all about,” affirms David Bennie, Marketing Manager - Medium Business at Microsoft. “The development of Office 2010 has been informed by requests from literally millions of users. While alternatives exist in the market, you have to ask: can they deliver the sort of connectivity, time-saving and business performance enhancements across the organisation that Office 2010 offers?”

In times of continuing economic uncertainty, expenses need to be controlled and no-one wants to buy technology for technology’s sake. However, a host of compelling new features and integration services mean Office 2010 is no longer just desktop productivity software. Rather, it should be a key component of your survival and growth strategy.

and an antidote to tough times

InvestmentA compelling

in productivity and efficiency,

Productivity for everyone

The new release of Office isn’t happening in a vacuum. There is a huge debate in business and IT over how to outsource ever more business technology so as to strip out cost and overhead. Office 2010 therefore extends the philosophy of Office 2007 in which Microsoft’s products have become progressively more integrated with open Web technologies, and available across multiple platforms. With Office 2010, therefore:

• Desktop software is augmented with Office Web Apps; online companions to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel®, Microsoft PowerPoint® and Microsoft OneNote® that allow you to easily review and edit business documents on the move through a standard browser; and introduce Web-driven data sources directly into documents.

• Documents can be read and edited on any Windows Mobile® smartphone, thanks to Microsoft Office Mobile

• Seamless integration with SharePoint means that Office documents can also be securely shared with, versioned and edited by as large a constituency as you need: other staff, departments, suppliers and even customers.

“Take an important document you have been working on,” says Chris Adams, Microsoft Office Client Product Manager. “Making edits with PC, phone or browser productivity offerings from other vendors more often than not will leave with a document that looks very different from what you started with, even where there is talk of document compatibility. That’s because different file formats strip out or don’t support some of the additions you created.

“With 2010, we’ve made the quality of that document paramount and its integrity a priority, so its richness is the same on different platforms and even if being accessed by multiple authors. That combination of quality and transportability is the best way to understand the whole Office 2010 philosophy. That’s why we think managers need to look at Office 2010 to see how it can help boost user productivity and make the new online based way of working as safe and productive for their staff as they can.”

Future-proof support for cloud computing

Office 2010 is not just flexible in its business use cases; your IT manager will also be pleased to know that it is flexible and economical to deploy. Committing to Office 2010 does not preclude your company from making the most of assets held online ‘in the cloud’; an approach Microsoft calls ‘Software Plus Services’. “Our message around Software Plus Services is that we do not want to force any customer into any either-or here”, says Adams. “If you are a small company and want to totally outsource your Microsoft Exchange e-mail to the cloud, we’d love to work with you. At the same time, if you are a larger organisation that wants to keep Exchange Server for the 500 people at head office but wants the flexibility of putting a small branch office onto cloud-based e-mail, not a problem. We are about providing choice to IT about how they best deliver value to their business today and tomorrow.”

Innovative functionality

So, what is under the bonnet of Office 2010? Innovation is present across the entire suite – from Word, which now has the native ability to embed and edit in-document video, extensive authoring and improved editing and printing features, to Excel, which has been empowered with features like the PivotPoint analytics add-on. Microsoft Outlook® has new e-mail viewing features which help users to navigate their ever-growing inboxes, and now there’s the powerful Office Web Apps that open up productivity to a whole host of new situations. Here are just a few of the highlights…

• The Social Connector: Add a social dimension to Outlook, with live updates and photos attached to each of your Outlook contacts. Outlook is already integrated with the global LinkedIn business network, with more online social connections to follow.

• ‘Share’ – it’s the new ‘Save’: Stop saving documents to your PC’s hard drive. Instead, save them to SharePoint or the Windows Live™ online repository. Sharing is now a doddle (yet a safe and secure doddle) for everyone.

• Broadcast PowerPoint: Blurring the line between presenting and Webcasting, you can now share and present PowerPoint presentations online direct from the software, for a simple yet effective shared experience.

• Sparklines: Embed visual data representations (bar charts, for example) directly into Excel cells to make any spreadsheet easy to understand and interpret.

• QuickSteps: Nothing to do with Strictly Come Dancing; QuickSteps are user-defined processes in Outlook which simplify repetitive actions.

• Custom Tags for OneNote: OneNote is Microsoft’s universal information management tool (it sounds complicated, but basically, you’ll never lose anything again). Now, any fragment in OneNote can be tagged for future reference with any keywords.

• Media-rich everything: Today’s documents and presentations need to be media-rich to make an impact. The days of drab text are long gone, and all Office 2010 applications allows you to edit and embed pictures, audio and video simply into your documents and Web output.

Enterprise engineering and attention to detail

With Office 2010, then, it’s Microsoft’s contention – in parallel with the acknowledged success of the recent Windows 7 OS launch – that engineering and attention to detail has been invested to bring the product to market with more functionality on the desktop than ever before, greater openness to the Web and its potential, and maximum safety and security. It connects seamlessly with the other flagship business applications, SharePoint and SQL Server 2008 R2 and so unlocks the potential of every employee to turn raw corporate data into competitive advantage.

That’s why Office 2010 is a lot more than ‘just’ an upgrade from 2007: it is designed to maximise every interaction with real-time data, whether that’s on the desktop or in an airport lounge thousands of miles away. It is available in a choice of versions to meet the needs of midsize organisations; and will integrate seamlessly with online hosted services; meaning your investment won’t be outdated in 12 months time. If technology is the new battleground for corporate competitiveness, Office 2010 is the new weapon of choice.

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Case Study – Community Energy Plus

Energy specialist Community Energy Plus (www.cep.org.uk) says Office 2010 has saved the equivalent of more than 3,500 staff hours annually. The group drives awareness and implementation of renewable energy and resource efficiency practices across the UK by working with local businesses and community organisations. Tim Jones, deputy director, says “Yes, Office 2010 saves us time, but the benefits extend far beyond that. We’re working better together, delivering projects faster, and working more closely on new and existing projects.”

Because the company’s 30 employees each had their own method of storing files and documents, they found it difficult (and time-consuming) to locate and consolidate all of the information they needed about a client or project in order to create proposals. Plus, employees lacked an efficient way to work together on documents at the same time - resulting in delays that impacted project completion. Simply printing and reviewing documents required multiple clicks through menus and sub-options that hampered productivity, and staff found that having to print several test runs to ensure accurate formatting of client-facing documents was an inefficient and frustrating process.

The organisation’s managers knew they needed to streamline everyday tasks so employees could work more efficiently to accelerate solution deployment to the growing client base. By deploying a beta version of Office 2010, the company was able to simplify everyday tasks and streamline workflow. With tools that enable users to store project-related files in one, easy-to-access location, employees were able to grasp a holistic view of all of the information they needed to create and deliver client proposals faster than ever. New co-authoring tools allow users to work concurrently on documents, enabling them to boost collaboration and complete business-critical projects in less time. With a new Word interface that reduces formatting and printing steps down to a few clicks, Community Energy Plus employees can save time and devote more energy to creating innovative client solutions.

“We can use OneNote to pull together different strands of information for a project – Web site URLS, browsing history, ideas and notes – and create and deliver projects faster than ever before,” says Ken Shaw, deputy director of Community Energy Plus. “What’s really amazing about Office 2010 is the way it brings us together as a team,” concludes Jones. “Co-authoring, coupled with OneNote, has redefined the way we work. We’re getting more done in less time.”

To find out more about Office 2010 Please visit: www.microsoft.com/uk/mboffice