New features in Office 2010 nothing to write home about

Paul Thurotte reports this week, in the always excellent Windows Supersite blog, on some new features in Office 2010. Looking down the list it's nothing dazzling, beyond its integration in the cloud, which should improve its collaboration capabilities. Of course, since many corporations use Office in conjunction with SharePoint, they get the collaboration features as part of the package.

The online component could be most useful for smaller businesses that don't want to invest in SharePoint, but still want to share documents in a collaborative environment. Still, other features listed, such as a screen capture tool, author permissions and a revamped Office button are probably not going to make people run out and buy the upgrade.

The truth is, Office has reached a maturity level where it's hard for a company to continue to add value in such a way that it can justify the upgrade costs. But, as Sheri McCleish points out on the Forrester Blog for Information and Knowledge Management Professionals, Microsoft has a commanding lead in the office productivity suite market, leaving competitors just a blip on the radar.

If companies are evaluating ways to cut costs, reducing the number of Microsoft Office licenses makes a lot of sense. Free or low-cost tools like OpenOffice and Google Docs provide a sufficient level of functionality that will be suitable for most employee's needs. Companies can still keep licenses for those employees who need the advanced tools in Excel for example, but cut back on the overall number of licenses in the future.

In a time when people are looking to cut costs, this would seem to be a reasonable approach. Most companies won't be willing to give up Microsoft Office, but if they can reduce their overall costs, it only makes sense to explore lower cost or free alternatives.

For more information:
- see the post on the Windows Supersite blog
- and the post on the Forrester blog

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