Office 2010 Now Available to the Business World

Marked by last Wednesday's Office 2010 launch event in New York City, the latest edition of Microsoft (News - Alert)'s office suite has officially hit the business world. Any company can now grab the new version to start evaluating and testing it. Along with the new Office edition, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 are also now available for all business customers.

As I discussed in a previous column, Microsoft has gradually been making Office 2010 available to different segments over the past few weeks. Those of us with MSDN or TechNet subscriptions were able to download the new version first on April 22. Originally, the only edition available was Office Professional Plus 2010, which includes a full suite of individual apps. But now Office Standard 2010, a version with fewer apps, is also on the download list. And initially, only one product key was available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, but now the full 10 keys are available.

Business customers or individuals with software assurance subscriptions were next on the Office 2010 availability list, followed by those with volume licenses until finally Office 2010 is now available to everyone else in the business community.

Along with the desktop version of Office 2010, Microsoft's new free Office Web Apps edition is also now available for businesses. Office Web Apps offers online flavors of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, giving you the ability to not only view but also edit your documents via the Web. But the version of Office Web apps for the business market is designed to use SharePoint 2010 as the document repository. So to use Web Apps internally, you'd need the newest version of SharePoint for your employees to store and share their Office documents. You can learn more about deploying and using Office Web Apps via SharePoint 2010 at Microsoft's Web Apps Deployment page.

For individual consumers, Office 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will hit the street on June 15, while the 'consumer' version of Office Web apps will debut on the same date. This consumer version will let you tap into your Windows SkyDrive storage space to save and manage documents online. Office Web Apps will officially replace Microsoft's current Office Live Workspace-a recent email from Microsoft confirmed this news and said that in the coming months my Office Live Workspace account would be upgraded to Office Web Apps.

Microsoft is targeting Office Web Apps to catch people who increasingly need to work remotely and may not be in front of a PC with the full desktop suite. The company is also hoping Office Web Apps will offer businesses an alternative to other Web-based document programs such as Google (News - Alert) Docs, which has seen greater adoption in the business world.

And with a renewed focus on the mobile market as evidenced by its upcoming Windows Phone (News - Alert) 7 series, Microsoft has also released a mobile version of Office 2010. The new Office Mobile 2010is currently geared to work on phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 but will make the transition to Windows Phone 7 when that debuts later this year.

And as if that weren't enough, Microsoft and Facebook (News - Alert) have also teamed up to offer a site called Docs, designed to allow you to share your Office documents with your FB friends. Currently in beta, Docs uses Office Web Apps to let you create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files or upload existing documents via the Docs webpage.

Microsoft is clearly striving to bring its bread-and-butter Office suite into the world of remote access and social networking, both to attract a more diverse audience and to stay relevant. It'll be interesting to see how the company's strategy pays off.