Office 2010 - Most secure, manageable Office yet!
Office 2010, expected H1 2010, will be a major release of the Office suite with a lot to enhance the end user computing experience of your users and allow them to be innovative and productive.
Add to this one of the real benefits for IT teams: that Office 2010 is an increasingly manageable application platform.
Thinking from that IT pro perspective, the following aspects are important considerations to take into account when thinking about our forthcoming productivity tools release for your estate:
Maximize performance on new & existing hardware. Office 2010 was built to maximize performance across the hardware you already own, while also positioning you for future hardware investments such as 64-bit chips, advanced graphics cards, and multi-core processors.
Help improve security with new layered defense. The Trusted Documents and Protected View features of layered defense combine to first determine the trustworthiness of a document and then, if not trusted, open for viewing in a protected sandbox for users to view before enabling. This tiered approached to document security is new in Office 2010. .
Enhanced connectivity to servers and services. With Office 2010, use Backstage, Web Apps, and application services such as Excel Services in order to connect with important business information and services, without users having to leave their familiar Microsoft Office environment. This helps to increase participation in server investments and reduce training costs.
Maintain compliance – accessibility to e-mail to ECM. Accessibility checker scans documents for issues that will impact users with disabilities and helps eliminates errors before they can cause harm to the business. Retention Policy is an archiving and retention tool that is more flexible to users’ workflow with capabilities such as item-level retention, user-created file application, and exception handling. These are examples of new Office 2010 tools & features that improve an organization’s ability to maintain compliance in a world of increasing information management demands
The security angle
We think UK Government is starting to take a keen interest in the security improvements we have added and enhanced in Office 2010 to protect users from both malicious attacks and inadvertant disclosure, in particular Gatekeeper (file validation), MOICE (Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment) and sandbox (Protected View). Added to the latest enhancements to Rights Management Services across the suite (for example poicy based centralised rights management in Outlook), this adds up to a fairly robust set of controls and defense mechanisms you can deploy to protect your information workers.
For more details about the numerous other security enhancements and detail on the ones above see: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179050(office.14).aspx.
Posted by Phil