Customer Discussion Guide

This guide is designed to arm you with key information that can help you make the most of sales opportunities with your customers.

Office 2010 Value Statement. The powerful, new features in Microsoft® Office 2010 give you the best productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser*—so you can take the ideas in your head and make them a business reality.

Top reasons to buy Office 2010.Work together in real time.

With more people working on the go these days, collaborating with coworkers can be a challenge. With Co-Authoring, multiple team members can work on a single document at the same time, so revisions, edits, and approvals can be made quickly and easily—from almost anywhere.

Stay on top of heavy workloads.

Managing e-mail these days can be overwhelming. Acting as a mute button for your inbox, the new Conversation View feature cleans up and removes duplicate information, so your e-mail stays organized and is easier to search.

Manage your business from anywhere.

The new Office 2010 simplified product line-up

Now you can present to customers across the room or across the world. With the new Broadcast Slide Show feature in Microsoft PowerPoint® 2010, you can control and present a slide show directly to anyone, anywhere with a browser.

Create professional materials that set you apart.

Take the quality of your work to the next level—without investing more time. The easy-to-use, powerful new video and photo editing tools in Office 2010 help you add real impact to your communications, without the expense of professional fees.

Keep productive on the go.

Get a seamless online/offline experience that saves you time. You can now work offline in SharePoint Workspace 2010 and then instantly sync only the changes to your PC when you get back online—so your content stays consistent and your team stays up-to-date.

Create powerful data insights.

Make faster and better-informed decisions. With new Sparklines in Excel 2010, entire trends can be shown in a single cell to help improve data visualization and give you meaningful insights into your business processes—so you can clearly determine your customers’ needs.

What other related products work well together with Office 2010?Microsoft Exchange Server 2010—compliant, security-enhanced messaging is simple and effective across your organization, using Outlook 2010 and Exchange Server 2010. Innovative tools such as MailTips notify you right before you send an e-mail to a group or to an individual who is outside the organization.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010—co-author your documents using SharePoint 2010 together with Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010, and OneNote 2010.

Windows Live—Use Windows Live to store, access, and share your documents via Office Web Apps for Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010, and OneNote 2010 so you can access your files from virtually anywhere.

w/BCM - Available with Business Contact Manager. * - Professional Academic suite available.

*An appropriate device, Internet connection, and supported Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari browser are required. Some mobility functionality requires Office Mobile 2010 which is not included in Office 2010 applications, suites, or Web Apps.

Answers to some of the most commonly asked questions. How to successfully manage key customer objections.

Objection: I can’t afford to deploy new technology and then have to train my people how to use it.

Response: The Ribbon and BackStage™ view in Office 2010 helps you learn as you use it. Through extensive research, Microsoft has learned the commands people use most, the

sequence in which they commonly use them, and which ones are accessed through the toolbar, mouse, and keyboard.

Based on that research, they have updated the Ribbon from applications in the Microsoft Office 2007 suites and made commands easier to find and more intuitive, so you don’t have to invest in costly training.

Objection: Competitive products are free.

Response: Yes, the license cost may be free for OpenOffice.org, but there are many other costs to consider such as deployment costs, migration costs, support costs, file fidelity verification costs, and end-user down time. Over time, customers generally find OpenOffice.org to be twice as expensive as Microsoft Office

when factoring in ongoing costs. OpenOffice.org doesn’t include an e-mail client or calendaring support, which is critical to

productivity. And having to use another solution for these will increase costs even more as users have to get trained on another interface.

Objection: Why should I buy a new version when we only use half the capabilities of the one we have today. What we have is good enough.

Response: Beyond new features and capabilities, we have improved the everyday essentials, which will immediately make your people more productive on the tasks they do every day. Nearly 20 percent of the clicks in Microsoft Office are around copy and paste. With Paste

Preview in Office 2010, it saves you time not having to hit “undo.” The average person reads about 1,800 messages per month and deletes about 1,500 of them.

With Outlook 2010, you can easily manage your e-mail and calendar with Conversation View, MailTips, Calendar Preview, and more.

Question: What’s new in Office 2010 versus previous versions?

Answer: Office 2010 now offers you powerful new ways to access and deliver your best work from your PC, your Windows Mobile®–based Smartphone, or from a Web browser—according to your schedule. Enhanced and new easy-to-use tools, customizable templates, color schemes, and video- and photo-editing

capabilities help you quickly create high-impact work. You can now work with people from different locations at the same time using the Co-Authoring experience

across Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Word 2010, OneNote® 2010, and Excel® 2010.

Question: How will Office 2010 help my business save money?

Answer: There are many different ways to explain to small and midsize business customers how Office 2010 can save them money such as: Saving time saves you money. Office Web Apps allow you to view and do light editing of your Microsoft

Office files from almost any device with a browser. Producing professional marketing campaigns in house saves you money. You can do video and photo

editing right from within the application, so there is no need to purchase or use professional editing software. Measuring ROI on marketing campaigns saves you money in the long term. Microsoft Outlook® 2010

with Business Contact Manager gives you easy-to-use guidelines that lead you through the process of creating marketing campaigns—from compiling mailing lists, to distributing materials and even analyzing your campaign results.

Question: I currently have Microsoft Office 2003. Which Office 2010 suite is best for my business?

Answer: Office 2010 offers great value across all the Microsoft Office suites. Each suite comes with different business and usage benefits to meet your unique requirements. For example; if you’re a home-based business or a business with less than four PCs that also uses your

business PC to manage your home budget, etc., it would be best for you to purchase Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010.

If you’re a small business customer with 5 to 24 PCs that wants to secure their business data and restrict PC access, you would need to purchase Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 through one of the Volume Licensing programs.

Question: Which Office 2010 license type is right for my small business customer?

Answer: Small businesses can purchase Office 2010 through Product Key Cards (PKC), Full Packaged Products (FPP), or Volume Licenses. The license type that is best for them depends on many factors, and might be

Office 2010 hardware specifications and system requirements.Processor: 500 megahertz (MHz) processor; 1 gigahertz (GHz) required for Outlook 2010 with Business Contact Manager

Memory: 256 megabyte (MB) RAM; 512 MB recommended for graphics features, Instant Search, Outlook 2010 with Business Contact Manager, and certain advanced functionality

Hard disk: 3.5 gigabyte (GB) available disk space

Display: 1024 x 768 or higher resolution monitor

Operating system: Windows® XP with Service Pack (SP) 3 (32-bit operating system only) or the Windows Vista® operating system with SP1, Windows 7, the Windows Server® 2003 R2 operating system with Microsoft XML Core Services 6.0, Windows Server 2008, or later 32- or 64-bit operating system

Graphics: Graphics hardware acceleration requires a Microsoft DirectX® 9.0c graphics card with 64 MB or more video memory

Internet: Windows Internet Explorer® 7.0 Internet browser or later, 32-bit browser only; Internet functionality requires an Internet connection

Windows Live™ ID: Certain online functionality requires a Windows Live ID

Product functionality and graphics may vary based on your system configuration. Some features may require additional or advanced hardware or server connectivity.

different from customer to customer.  Our experience suggests that businesses with more than 25 PCs are most satisfied when they purchase through

Volume Licensing and take advantage of benefits such as simplified activation, portable device rights, downgrade rights, and centralized license purchasing.

For companies with fewer than 25 PCs, or those purchasing software with a new PC, or on an ad hoc basis, PKC and FPP are excellent choices. PKC is a new single-use license type which activates any of the Consumer/Small Business Office 2010 suites that are preloaded on new PCs by PC manufacturers.

Office 2010 provides licensing options that will meet your customers’ needs, independent of their circumstances. 

** not for use in any commercial, nonprofit, or revenue generating activities, or by government organizations.

Additional resources:Partner Learning Center: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9697995

Microsoft Partner Network: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9697996

Learn More about Office 2010 for small and mid-size businesses: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9697997

Winning Against the Competition: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9697998