Office 2010 wins NSW DET, John Holland

At the local launch in Sydney this morning, Tracey Fellows, managing director of Microsoft Australia, said that some 8.6 million customers globally had taken part in the beta testing of the new Office 2010. As part of the launch, Fellows presented IT managers from a number of Australian businesses that took part in this testing.

The NSW Department of Education and Training's general manager of information technology Maria Claudia Romero revealed that the department is currently trialling Office 2010's web-based applications as an "eBackpack" for students, containing all their school work that can be edited at home or in the classroom. She noted user collaboration application OneNote in particular was a popular part of the new suite.

"We call it the killer application, and students and teachers absolutely love it," she said. "It's easy to use and now they are using it to collaborate together."

Les Oates, chief information officer of construction giant John Holland, said the browser-based sharing ability of SharePoint 2010 was important for the company's project delivery systems and had allowed the company to show high-level diagrams made in Visio with John Holland's joint venture partners even if they do not have Visio themselves.

Oates told ZDNet Australia that the upgrade of SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint 2007 on John Holland's intranet had been "very successful". He noted that there had been very little call for IT support from the 6000 users since the implementation.

Medical device manufacturer ResMed's global IT infrastructure director David Lewis said that an initial trial of 50 users had to be expanded to 150 due to the popularity of the suite. He also cited OneNote as a favourite for the company.

The company's monthly manager report had been made simpler because employees could collaborate on it simultaneously instead of having to merge different sections together when everyone had finished their portion.