Office 2010 features for legal

Well its that time again, and legal firms in the UK are fast approaching decision time on how to takle the long and winding road that leads to the latest Microsoft Office offering.  Having personally spoken to a cross section of firms over the last few weeks, I thought it would be good to write an overview article on the common conversation items and cover a few of the things that the new version of word has to offer in terms of the legal industry.  I plan to delve into each of the items in a bit more detail over the coming weeks as and when I get some time to do so..  

So without further ado..

What is in Office 2010 that is relevant to legal and how will it save me time and/or money across the firm?

So lets start with a couple of potential money savers...

• Document Comparison:  Word 2010 has document comparison functionality and while it may not be as detailed as some of the other products available, it may very well suffice for the majority of users if you were out to cut down licences on third party products.  I only managed to find a Video of this feature in Office 2007 -
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1J19uluI5U
• PDF Rendition:  Office now comes with the ability to produce PDFs nativley, so no need for software like PDF995 any more..
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_n0EUST6T0
• Meta-Data Stripping:  Office now comes with the ability to strip out any potentially dangerous meta-data within documents as well so more potential licence savings if you use third party meta-data stripping tools/servers.
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfVQ7g28tA0

Now onto the features that might save you a bit of time

• The 2010 Ribbon:  The ribbon in 2010 is not hugely different to 2007 but now allows for more extensive customisation than before.. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/office-video-FX102493438.aspx 
• Styles Gallery:  Finally we get a style gallery that can hide and re-order styles shown to the user meaning you can have much greater control over the documents that are created within your firm and reduce the risk of corruption
  Video here

And some changes from pre Office 2007..

• Navigation pane:  A quick and easy way to navigate your large documents has been introduced called the navigation pane,  see it in action here
• Building Blocks:  Create, store and manage sections of content for constructing documents within Word  .. check them out in Word 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyzAqQ7D6mk  
  
  

And here are some features that microsoft are making some noise about...

• Document Co-Authoring:  Using SharePoint 2010 as a back-office server, you can now (should you want to) enable people to work on the same document at the same time (i.e. two cursors typing in the same document) - 
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/video-coauthoring-in-word-2010-VA101848883.aspx
• Sharepoint 2010 Integration:  Microsoft have ramped up their integration with the latest SharePoint offering with Office 2010 and also with the imminent release of Office 365 (and things like SkyDrive) to the small business and home market basic document management principles are being introduced to a much wider audience these days.
  Video here