Introduction

Office 2010, a new version of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, will be generally available in May 2010. As a mature product, Office is unlikely to gain or lose many features or undergo wholesale architectural changes, but evaluating a new version of Office is still challenging because the suite is composed of separate but related products, including Word, Excel, and Outlook, and some products, such as Outlook, work best when connected to a Microsoft server such as Exchange or SharePoint. One way to keep evaluation manageable is by starting with a stand-alone evaluation of the products without any servers, and then move on to evaluate the products with Exchange and SharePoint. Organizations evaluating Office 2010 stand-alone should consider the product’s new capabilities, the Office version they have already deployed, and the cost of acquiring and deploying the new version.

What Is Office 2010?

Office 2010 is a suite of applications that comes in many different editions. Six products are typically available in most Office 2010 editions: Access (database), Excel (spreadsheet), OneNote (note-taking), Outlook (e-mail client), PowerPoint (presentations), and Word (text documents). These products are considered core because they are included in the editions of Office that most organizations license.