Office 2010 Powers Wave on Microsoft Product Roadmap

Contributing Analysts: Michael Cherry, Rob Helm, Don Retallack, and Matt Rosoff

New versions of Office, SharePoint, Project, and Visio became available for volume customers in May 2010. The new versions make significant improvements for collaboration, and for business intelligence functions such as reporting and data analysis, among other areas. However, many new capabilities require coordinated upgrades of multiple products, which can complicate evaluating and deploying the new versions.

Many of the products discussed here have previously been branded “Office” and presented as part of an “Office System” of products. This practice has changed with the 2010 versions: most of these products will drop the prefix in their 2010 versions. Microsoft will continue to call the Office suite itself Microsoft Office with an edition name (e.g., Microsoft Office Professional Plus.) In addition, some previous Office products have been discontinued or merged. (See the chart “Office Product Name Changes“.)