Introduction
The Office Productivity Suite consists of several productivity programs that can be used for computing in an office. These programs are collectively known as Office Software Suite and include the common desktop publishing programs such as a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and Presentation. One such office suite is the Microsoft Office Productivity Suite that includes Microsoft Office (MS Office). The other competitors in the field of productivity suites are OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, and Lotus Symphony. This paper provides a comprehensive explanation of Microsoft 2010 and its versions, the applications included in each versions, and comparison of MS office 2010 with OpenOffice.org and CCBC’s Office 365.
Microsoft Office 2010
MS Office 2010 is a descendant of MS Office 2007 and it can be easily operated on the different versions of windows operating system such as Windows XP, Windows 7 and 8, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008. MS Office 2010 features an intuitive, context sensitive user interface with advanced features with greater ease as the programs are bundled together in a suite (Reding, 53).
Versions of MS Office 2010
Microsoft Office is a full suite of programs; however not all programs are used by every user. Depending on the various users, the versions are Starter edition, Office Online, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus. Office 2010 is available in several configurations, but all include Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and other configurations include Access, Outlook, Publisher and other programs (Reding, 53).
The Starter Edition consists of Word Starter, Excel Starter and PowerPoint viewer. Office Online includes Word Basic, Excel Basic, PowerPoint Basic and OneNote Basic. The Home and Student and Home and Business editions consist of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote; however the Home and Business also has Outlook. The Standard editions consist of all programs of Home and Business, and an additional program called Publisher.
The Professional edition includes all programs of Standard edition along with a new program called Access. The last edition, Professional Plus has all programs of Professional edition and new programs such as InfoPath, Lync (earlier Microsoft communicator) and support for SharePoint Workspace. The Professional Academic and Professional have similar applications.
Licensing of MS Office 2010
Microsoft Office as a software offering under the desktop applications licensing model is licensed on a “peer-device” basis where users assign the MS Office license to a single physical hardware system (Volume Licensing brief, 2). So, only one Office 2010 suite can be activated on one computer. However, the disc version of Home and Business, and Professional 2010 allows one user to install a single copy on one computer and a second copy on a portable device. Microsoft provides a Volume Activation Management tool that aids the administrators to perform licensing and various tasks that are related to activation of the product.
Cost of MS Office 2010 Versions
The cost of MS Office versions is different for the boxed product and the product key
card. The product key card is priced lesser than the box products. The price of Home and Student 2010 is priced at $149 for box product, and $119 for product key card. Similarly, the Home and Business edition costs $279 for box product and $199 for product key card. The professional edition for a box product will cost $499 and additional $99 for Professional academic, but the product key card for Professional edition is only $349.
Versions of OpenOffice.org (OOO)
The different versions of OpenOffice are OpenOffice org 1, OpenOffice org 2, OpenOffice org 3, Openoffice org 3.4 Beta 1, and the latest Apache OpenOffice 4.01. The applications that are included in OpenOffice.org are Writer (Word Processor), Calc (Spreadsheet), Impress (PowerPoint), Draw (MS Visio), Base (Database, similar to Access), Math (comparable to Publisher in MS Office). OpenOffice does not have complete support for the new file formats created by Office 2010 (Bonfield and Quinn, 2010).
Microsoft supports cloud storage in which the users can edit documents instantaneously on the web using Word, Spreadsheet and PowerPoint. This feature is not yet implemented in OpenOffice.org versions as it still operates as a standalone computer. Few advanced features that are not available in OpenOffice are inbuilt grammar checking, document-viewing options, conditional formatting and smart art diagrams that allow the user to easily create diagrams in a many common formats (Bonfield and Quinn, 2010).
CCBC’s Office 365
MS Office 365 is a cloud productivity solution assembled at one location. The services offered are useful for the professionals, small sized business, mid-sized and large enterprises, and also to the education communities. Office 365 for education provides educational institutions simple-to-use and easy to administer cloud-based productivity tools (Withee and Reed, 21). The features offered by CCBC’s Office 365 to the students are access to Exchange Online, Lync Online, Office Webs Online, and SharePoint Online. Students have the privilege to access these features without any cost, as for the faculty and the staff there is a nominal price to use the features of Office 365.
Works Cited
Bonfield, Brett, Quinn, Laura. S. Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org. Idealware.org. (July
2010). Web.
Reding, Elizabeth Eisner. Microsoft® Office 2010: Illustrated Introductory, First Course:
Introductory. Illustrated. Cengage Learning. (2010). Print.
Volume License Briefing. Licensing Microsoft Office software in Volume Licensing. Retrieved
Withee, Ken. Reed, Jennifer. Office 365 For Dummies. Illustrated. John Wiley & Sons. (2012).
Print.
