Microsoft Australia's Oscar Trimboli (left) with David Lewis, Global IT Infrastructure Director, ResMed, and Oconics CEO Jonaathon Rickert at the Sydney SharePoint 2010/Office 2010 launch event.

A quartet of high profile corporate and government customers have helped Microsoft launch Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for business users in Australia, with the consumer launch of Office to follow in June after which the much-anticipated online versions of office applications will also become available.

The new collaborative capabilities of Office 2010 are promoted as a key differentiator for the new editions, however these features are currently only available to those who have also deployed SharePoint 2010 or Exchange 2010. The ability to share documents and collaborate on the Web will be more widely available when Office Web Apps launch on Windows Live in the second half of 2010.

At the Sydney launch event for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, a group of four Australian users from legal, manufacturing, government and infrastructure were on hand to discuss their early experiences.

These included the NSW Department of Education and Training, ResMed, a global leader in the development of medical products, law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth and infrastructure and engineering giant John Holland.

Tracey Fellows, Managing Director of Microsoft Australia said the new Office 2010 suite, combined with SharePoint 2010 and new Office Web Applications, has made the cloud a reality for Australian businesses.

“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will redefine how Australian businesses can use technology to save, innovate and grow.

ResMed has been using the OneNote application in Office 2010 to improve participation across the organisation. David Lewis, Global IT Infrastructure Director, ResMed said, “The value of OneNote 2010 was a real surprise once we began using it. With Office 2010, we have the right tools in place to help the organisation deliver ongoing improvements – we now have employees from other areas asking for OneNote to be installed on their PCs.”

There are 3000 staff working around the globe for ResMed and and 1200 in Sydney alone. The company designs state-of-the-art solutions for conditions such as sleep apnea, and previously brainstorming sessions consisted of assembling a bunch of creative people in a room with a white board and sticky notes.

"We are now a distributed company so we needed visibility across the organisation," said Lewis.

"We needed to be able to track, search and report on the ideas stream being developed in our process of continuous innovation."
Australian solutions provider Oconics took two weeks to implement a solution using OneNote 2010 and SharePoint 2010 that is able to export the results of creative brainstorming sessions between global participants to an Excel spreadsheet.

OneNote 2010 is also positioned as a research assistant, and is now able to be "docked" to the desktop, automatically recording links and document references as you cut and paste copy or images from an assortment of sources (although these must be Microsoft apps, Explorer, Word, etc. It will not automatically record links to web pages browsed in Firefox or Adobe PDF documents).

The use of SharePoint at ResMed does not extend to document and records management, where a solution from Australia's Objective is dealing with the challenges of meeting the onerous auditing requirements for a medical manufacturer, which comes under scrutiny from international regulatory bodies.

ResMed is implementing Objective-based workflows for to automate many of its business processes and reviewing the portal-based Objective 6i solution to provide global access to the repository.

Australian analyst, Peter Carr, Managing Director at Longhaus, believes "SharePoint will become the go-to standard as an aggregation portal for other major content management brands within large organisations. With improved identity management tools, as an unstructured content management portal, it certainly meets the needs of the market at this stage.”

Australia's Corrs Chambers Westgarth, a 1000 strong law firm, has begun to implement SharePoint as a solution to replace an ageing business intelligence (BI) platform.

CIO John Kenton said the scope has increased and it is now moving to embrace collaboration and enterprise search.

"SharePoint will become the central window on all our business applications," he said.

Kenton lists some of the major attractions as the speedy development cycle, familiar Microsoft interface and the off-line capability, an attractive feature for a large legal form with a very mobile workforce.

The NSW Department of Education and Training plan to use Office 2010 to create dynamic educational materials that will enhance teaching and learning.

Stephen Wilson, Chief Information Officer, New South Wales Department of Education and Training said, “Our goal is to build a collaborative learning community where teachers and students can preserve their learning story and showcase their achievements. An environment where millions of connections are made and shared. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will help our teachers and students build the foundation for 21st century learning.”

The deployment of Office 2010 to 140,000 laptops across the state was accomplished by the use of virtual machines and streaming application servers.

John Holland’s CIO, Les Oates said, “We felt Visio 2010 would be a really good fit for us. We need users to understand what the business processes are in order to do their work. Visio 2010 allows users to click on a business process within the procedure to open up the forms they require to do their work. It’s a real advantage for us.”

Some highlights of the new launch of Office 2010 include:

New picture editing tools in Word, that provide the ability to create an image mask and remove a background without going out to an image editing tool such as Photoshop;

The ability to embed video and perform basic editing within PowerPoint, where you can also broadcast a presentation to another PC via the Web;

The new co-authoring features in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and OneNote; and the new Outlook Social Connector, which brings company communication and social network feeds directly into Outlook;

A customisable Ribbon interface, that now starts with the familiar File command instead of the unloved "Globe" introduced in Office 2007.