Office 2010 is expected to be "relatively painless" to learn for workers already familiar with the Ribbon menu format introduced in Office 2007.
Large enterprises that have existing upgrade agreements with Microsoft should not hesitate to go ahead with Office 2010, McLeish said in an interview. "On the heels of the recession, we're seeing the rise of the cloud, which is disruptive to the product release cycle." "There is an understanding that these are the types of investments that can probably be pushed out, so the cycle is rather delicate," McLeish said.
Initial use of new features may not be seamless.Įnterprises typically consider upgrading hardware and software every few years, but factors such as the economy can affect that timeline, as well as considerations about using hosted services.Because the Visual Basic for Applications language was upgraded to support 64-bit, and the object model has been updated, more effort for remediation may be needed for bulk conversions and migrating content.Some applications that were written for 32-bit Office will not work in a 64-bit process.In her report, McLeish wrote that there were three issues about Office 2010 that enterprises should understand:
"For marketing or companies focused on highly professional content, these capabilities will help." Features of note, according to McLeish, include external document collaboration in SharePoint, the option of accessing Office apps from a private cloud and the use of social networking through Outlook.Ĭompany needs and expectations around the use of multimedia content is another factor to consider.
They will not run on Windows Server 2003 R2 with MSXML 6.0 or Windows XP SP3.Įnterprise customers considering moving to Office 2010 likely will be interested several new features, according to Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish in a recent report. The 64-bit versions of Office 2010 will run on all 64-bit versions of Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008. The 32-bit versions of Office 2010 will run on a variety of 32-bit operating systems, including Windows 7, Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 R2 with MSXML 6.0. The requirements are relatively low, he added, and will not be an issue for netbooks, which generally are capable of using up to 224 MB or 256 MB of memory. Computers with multicore processors will run Office 2010 even faster, Dubec said in the blog. This added capability helps to increase graphics rendering in Excel, as well as graphics and video integration features in PowerPoint. Office 2010 assumes a minimum of Microsoft DirectX 9.0c-compliant graphics processors with 64 MB of video memory. Unlike Office 2007, Office 2010 has a GPU requirement.
Reasons for the expanded disk use include the code requirements of 64-bit Office, the inclusion of OneNote, optional free trial versions of Office Professional 2010 and the use of the Ribbon user interface throughout the suite. Office 2010 takes up more disk space compared with Office 2007 and Office 2003, with the suites occupying an additional 1.0 GB or 1.5 GB. In contrast, Office 2003 specified a 233 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. The minimum system requirements for Office 2010 include: Intel Pentium III processor, 500 MHz 256 MB PC100 SDRAM and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3. Microsoft plans to release Office 2010 in June, although it's currently available as a public beta release for testing.ĭubec listed Office 2010's minimum system requirements, which he defined as describing "the kind of computer that an average Office customer needs to have in order to have an acceptable experience performing typical tasks." The company is not releasing "recommended" hardware requirements because having two requirements is just too confusing to users, Dubec explained. That approach contrasts with the near doubling of those requirements between Office 2003 and Office 2007 versions, Dubec noted. CPU and RAM requirements did not increase this time for Office 2010.