Microsoft Touts Closer Ties Between SharePoint, Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 arrived in retail stores Tuesday, and Microsoft hosted an all-day event at its Silicon Valley campus to show off the new software to IT workers.

The verdict? The demos look slick, but the software/hardware package can get pricey.

That's because to get the most from Office 2010, you need more than just Office. Demonstrator Chris Henley was also running a 64-bit client and four servers with Windows Server 2008 and a domain controller running Active Directory, SharePoint Services, Exchange, SQL Services (now called SQL Azure) and Communicator (Microsoft's instant messaging product).

Although he declined to give a price -- Microsoft offers a variety of software licensing schemes -- he said the hardware is the most expensive part, especially because users will need to go well beyond Microsoft's minimum requirements if they want good performance.

Henley began his demo with a blast from the past, showing a series of screenshots of old versions of Microsoft Word to show how far Microsoft has come with the product. First there were toolbars (on a 640x480-pixel screen), then drop-down menus, then automatic spell-checking and grammar checking and the unpopular animated paper clip named Clippy to help with Office tasks.

Microsoft's two most popular requests from users back in the mid-1990s were how to get rid of Clippy and how to change Clippy into a dog (which Microsoft eventually did), Henley said. Another Microsoft user-request fact from Henley: about 80 percent of the new features requested for Office are already in the product -- users just don't know how to find them and use them.

But he moved quickly into showing how tightly Office and SharePoint and SQL Server are tied together. From within Outlook e-mail, for instance, Henley used SharePoint's social networking features to gather information on other employees -- then he used Outlook to schedule a meeting.

He also used a SharePoint sales portal to gather sales data from SQL Server and present it in SharePoint in an Excel document -- the Web-based version, which is new with Office 2010 and went live online last week. Excel 2010 has been expanded from 65,000 rows to 16.6 million rows and now supports a tool called PowerPivot that Henley used to structure and drill down into the data.

"Microsoft is starting to blur the line between what we expect to see in Word, Excel, Outlook and SharePoint," he said. "The idea is to integrate Office and SharePoint to make workflow for the user easy."

Many steps that used to require programming are now features that IT administrators can turn on and off. "One of our biggest challenges was helping SharePoint partners identify new markets that are not already built in to SharePoint," he said. "…I've not been a great SharePoint fan in the past, but today I feel like I can pick it up and install it and run it with a fair amount of confidence."

Microsoft officials have said repeatedly that the company will never put all its software in the cloud, as Google has done, and the Office Web Apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (collaboration software that shares Microsoft content and content from the Web) - benefit from the full, more powerful and more expensive off-line versions of Microsoft's new software.

Upgrading from the older versions can get tricky, though - the complexity is proportional to how much you've customized previous versions, and the performance is proportional to how much data you have. Check third-party apps (Microsoft provides tools for this) for dependencies on previous versions. "You will have downtime," Henley said.

One IT consultant who attended the demos, Matthew Borcherding, said he was looking but is not yet ready to buy. In addition to the price, he said, he's figuring it will take about a year for Microsoft and its application partners to get the kinks out of the new software.