Time goes by pretty fast in the world of technology. In the year 2000, Facebook didn’t exist. In 2005, neither did Bing. So, if you look at Office 2010 and ask yourself: “Hang on, didn’t we have a new edition of Office in 2007?”, you’d be right - but that was three years ago, and the world has changed.
Actually, you can easily trace the family tree of Office 2010 back to 2007; because it continues trends which were made apparent in the 2007 edition. It was this version which broke away from the individual employee’s desktop and became a tool which integrates with the many live data sources within a company, or indeed across the internet at large.
Office 2010 continues this trend. The starting point was to ask some fundamental questions about business processes. In the digital economy (and that means just about any business), extracting, filtering and using information are the broad challenges. Office 2007 allowed data to be easily extracted from data sources across an organisation (for example SQL data repositories). Office 2010 dramatically improves the collaborative capacity of teams by doing more with data once it has been extracted:
- Firstly, the desktop software itself has been further augmented to pull more intuitive and actionable insight out of your data repositories. New functionality includes:
- Slicers; visually appealing live controls in Excel which allow you to set up macro-driven views for comparison of data
- Better searching in PivotTables; including the ability to name datasets
- Sparklines; another naturalistic way to represent data; sparklines are intuitively understood graphics which fit into a single Excel cell thereby putting graphical representations into the reading-flow of documents.
- PowerPivot for Excel: a data analysis add-in that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love
All of these functions serve to make larger amounts of data more easily comprehensible, and therefore of faster and more effective use to decisionmaking.
- Second, version control has been built directly into the business intelligence process. If live-updated data is going to find its way into documents, then the need for a “single version of the truth” and a single master document is ever more crucial. Office 2010 includes native improved version control, not only allowing teams to collaborate effectively, but even for live co-authoring to take place. All this, of course, happens through the familiar Office interface.
- And then, Office 2010 can be used in more ways than ever before.
- With the Excel WebApp, you can view, edit and most importantly co-author a spreadsheet through nothing more than your standard internet browser. The Excel WebApp uses the same calculation engine as “full Excel”, and generates similarly stunning graphics. Operating through a browser, however, the WebApp again means data can be stored anywhere or retrieved from multiple repositories.
- Excel Services, meanwhile, continues to add further integration of Excel with SharePoint; meaning business intelligence can be shared and worked on through SharePoint portals. Again, this brings feature-rich Excel functionality to users through just a browser.
What does all this mean to the hard-pressed CTO - or more importantly CFO? Having bags of new functionality alone isn’t a convincing enough argument in these straitened economic times. On the contrary, Office 2010 is all about maximising the value of existing IT investments.
Firstly, if your company already uses any of Microsoft’s collaborative tools - the back-end SQL, or a front end like SharePoint, Office 2010 massively extends both their functionality and shelf-life. The natural interaction of Office with SharePoint means that:
- Everyone in an organisation with Office can get maximum functionality from SharePoint; so greater value can be extracted from investments in these collaborative technologies
- Office 2010’s integration of online and desktop resources allows SharePoint resources like portals to truly extend to each user’s familiar desktop - even when they are well beyond the physical boundaries of the office; again increasing ROI.
Training time and cost can also be cut. The extension of the role of Office beyond the desktop and into powerful data management (and a clear similarity with SharePoint) means that more can be achieved from the one piece of software. Plus, as the most used piece of productivity software on the planet, and one which is found on many home computers at purchase too, it is one with which millions of workers are already familiar. In truth, Office 2010 makes business intelligence and enterprise workflow effectively seamless to the user.
Finally, there are benefits to the IT department, too. Seamless integration of Office 2010 with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 means that once data flows have been activated; users can generate their own reporting functions. They can take data (with role-driven permissions), integrate it with other sources and perform lightning-fast calculations on the desktop. This can often negate the need for expensive query functions crafted by third party integration specialists.
Indeed, a crucial role of the CTO in an Office 2010 enabled workplace is to become an evangelist for collaboration. By monitoring user-generated reporting and dashboard functions, the IT team can become a driver for the strategic application of information across departments and line-of-business functions.
Office 2010 continues the work begun in the 2007 edition: making better use of the massive data flows in midsize organisations through functionality which is powerful but remains intuitive. At a time when “change management” is the norm rather than the exception, every desktop PC (and mobile device) can have access to information which resides anywhere in the organisation; making for better real-time decisionmaking and improving communication in all the functions of your business.
