Office 2010 as a product has received some rave reviews from the analysts and I am sure a lot of IT Managers in the Enterprise space will be looking out to guidance on how to rollout Office 2010 in the enterprises.

Microsoft has released a fairly large number of resources for the IT Pros and IT Managers to enable the rollout. Some of these resources had been listed in a previous post I had published to this blog site. However, the sheer quantum of information available can at time become a hurdle in accelerating deployments. In this post I intend to provide IT Pros and IT Managers with a step by step guidance on how to rollout Office 2010 in their companies/organizations. There is nothing new about this guidance; as a matter of fact a fairly comprehensive document with over 593 plus pages is already available from the Microsoft site for the IT Pros reference. In this post I will be focusing on helping you digest the 593 pages and point you to the appropriate resources online and in the guidance note.

I will be breaking this post into multiple parts so that information is both created and published in digestible packets.

Microsoft’s recommendation for an Office 2010 deployment is based on the Crawl Walk and Run philosophy and so the recommended method is to take things step by step.

Discover and Explore

Before you start the deployment of Office 2010 it is important to understand the Office 2010 application and specifically the new capabilities that are new in Office vis-à-vis both Office 2007 and Office 2003. Microsoft Office 2010 has some significant changes for both end users as well as IT Pros. Part 1 of the article will focus on key changes that are important to IT Pros.

Let’s go through some of the important changes:

1. The first change that has been brought about in Office 2010 is on the packaging of the Suite. Office 2010 comes in 6 variants 4 for the Academic & Retail and 2 for Volume Licensing Customers. The Chart below lists out the different variants.

   

   IT Pros will note that the Office 2010 Standard Volume Licensing Variant now contains 2 additional products namely Office OneNote and Office Publisher and provides users with the rights to access their Office Web Applications on a in Premise SharePoint Foundation Services 2010 Server or SharePoint Server 2010. Similarly, Office Professional plus Variant of Office 2010 provides users with access to Office SharePoint Workspaces and Office Web Applications. The Office Enterprise Variant of Office has now been discontinued and Office Professional Plus is the highest Office SKU to be sold by Microsoft in the context of Office 2010.

2. The second sets of changes in Office 2010, which have an impact on IT Pros, are related to Licensing and Volume Activation. Volume activation as a technology was first introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista OS and Windows Server 2008. This technology has now been extended to the Office Suite of Products and enables Volume licensing customers to automate the activation process in a way that is transparent to end users. Office 2010 provides customers with a choice of either the Key Management Services (KMS) based approach or the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) based approach or a combination of the two approaches for the activation of their Office installations. A detailed FAQ on Volume activation is available on the TechNet Site and can be accessed by clicking here.
3. The third most important change is that Office now has a separate 64-bit edition which has been specifically engineered for leveraging the 64-bit processors and the memory in excess of the 4 GB limit supported by 32 bit environments. This additional capacity will typically be required when one is running extremely CPU and memory intensive applications or working on Excel Spreadsheets of size in Excess of 2 GB.
4. The fourth change in Office 2010 is related to the investments that Microsoft has made to make Office 2010 more secure. Microsoft has provided 5 new controls to harden and reduce the attack surface. Below is a list of these changes and links to learn more about it.
   
   • Data Execution Prevention (DEP) support for Office applications: A hardware and software technology that helps harden the attack surface by preventing the execution of viruses and worms that exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
   • Office file validation is a mechanism by which the application checks the file for any fuzzing before the file is opened.
     
   • Expanded file block settings: provide group policy options to provide specific controls on the kind of files that a application may access.
     
   • Office ActiveX kill bit is a feature that Administrators can use to specific types of ActiveX controls to be run within Office Applications.
     
   • Protected View is a sandbox environment that helps mitigate attacks by enabling users to preview the document within a Secure Viewer.
     

   Click on the hyper link to read a detailed security overview of Office 2010. Microsoft has also provided a detailed guide for planning security in Office 2010.

5. Office Customization Tool (OCT) is the main tool used by administrators for customizing their Office installs. OCT is part of the setup program and can be accessed using the volume licensed version of the installation media. To check if the installation media is the volume licensed version look for the Admin folder on the Office 2010 installation disk. One can run OCT by typing setup.exe /admin. So if your installation media is on \\testserver\share\Office2010\ then open the Command prompt running as Administrator and navigate to \\testserver\share\Office2010\. In the root folder where the installation media is stored type setup.exe /admin. This will open up the OCT and allow you to create the MSP file for installation of Office 2010.In Office 2010 there are some enhancements in the OCT tool. These enhancements are listed below:
   • Firstly there are two architecture specific versions of the OCT tool. One each for the 32-Bit and the 64-Bit version.
   • The import feature in OCT allows you to import the 32-Bit OCT customization (.msp) file updates into the 64-Bit version. Similarly the 64-Bit .msp updates into the 32-bit.
   • Office 2010 OCT now supports adding multiple outlook email accounts.

   For detailed information please read TechNet article on Office customization tool in Office 2010.

6. Office 2010 is also been created grounds up to support application virtualization. For a detailed information on Office 2010 Application Virtualization read the paper “Planning and Deployment Guide for the Application Virtualization System”

   (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=156611).

In the next part of this series we will discuss tools and methods that can be used to assess the current environment for readiness to deploy Office 2010.