Will Office 2010 "Make it Great" or Crash and Burn at Your Firm?

Written by Christy Burke  | 26 July 2010

Make it Great. Yes, that’s the vanilla marketing tagline Microsoft came up with for promoting Office 2010. This begs the question that’s on legal IT’s collective mind these days: is 2010 actually great, or is it chaos and misery stuffed into a shrink-wrapped box?

On May 12, 2010, Microsoft announced worldwide availability of Office 2010, so the product is officially out of the gate…and running? The issue is: will it run well, will it be in the running for your firm, or will it run you over? Microsoft dominates the legal market and is part of the woodwork of most law firms by now, so many sites are likely to be impacted by this new release, for better or for worse.

Bleeding edgers and beta testers among law firm technology professionals have already seen the product, and in some cases installed it. By now, perhaps they have decided whether to do a full or partial rollout within the next year, or to wait until Microsoft’s next magnum opus arrives. Other firms have yet to evaluate or make a decision about Office 2010, having only recently recovered from their Office 2007 implementations, which freaked out end-users with the ribbon and the surprise removal of the File Menu, their trusty compass, contents of which were cleverly concealed behind a flowery Microsoft-colored graphic.

Within the next 6-12 months, legal IT will need to make recommendations about upgrading to Office 2010 and will actually execute on the upgrades. Also, they will need to nail down the potential repercussions that upgrading to Office 2010 will have on all their legal software applications which integrate with Microsoft technology. Many firms have several legal software products that depend upon Microsoft, such as their DMS, document assembly and macro/template programs, metadata scrubbers, redline comparison tools and essential niche tools such as Table of Authorities production tools. Microsoft Office is the wheel that turns all these spokes, so if Office changes, the apps must be compatible to come along for the ride.

Bob DuBois is IT Director for Devine Millimet & Branch, P.A. in Manchester, New Hampshire. DuBois monitors listservs and notes that a lot of legal IT folks are going to skip 2007 and go directly to Office 2010. He says Devine Millimet is definitely going forward with 2010, explaining that “the loss of the File Menu in Office 2007 caused a lot of angst here, and Microsoft has brought back the File menu in 2010. We are projecting to have the rollout done by late Q3 or early Q4, 2010.”

When asked about the Office Suite’s stability, DuBois remarked that “Office 2003 was pretty stable, and 2007 only had one service pack. Based on those results, I am hoping that Office 2010 will be rock solid.”

Cathy Nuxoll is the Director of IT and Marketing at Moser & Marsalek, P.C. in St. Louis. According to Nuxoll, the firm recently completed a desktop refresh and installed Office 2007 with Windows 7, and therefore they have no plans to upgrade to MS Office 2010 any time soon.

Although Nuxoll thinks MS Office 2010 has a lot of great features, including the updated Outlook interface, it would be a major undertaking to upgrade to 2010 in the near future. She says, "MS Office ties into so many different programs. If we were to update to 2010 we would also need to upgrade several other applications that we have at the same time."

Judi Flournoy is CIO of Loeb & Loeb, a large firm headquartered in Century City, California. Flournoy was not a beta tester for Office 2010, but the firm is intending to run a pilot/proof of concept in October 2010 with a rollout commencing in February 2011. She says Loeb’s users are eagerly anticipating a number of improvements to the suite, including “better access to features, new features such as video editing in PowerPoint and Sparklines in Excel.” When asked about integration and upgrade issues, Flournoy notes, “We hope to run up against very few migration/integration issues. Only our vendors can tell us if we will.”

On the legal technology vendor side, the software companies are definitely under pressure to get their integrations tested and completed. That way, their law firms can upgrade to Office 2010 without disrupting their workflow, and the vendors’ tech support department is not flooded with angry complaints.

Veteran legal software developers like Levit & James, whose current product is Best Authority which builds a Table of Authorities in a litigation brief, achieved compatibility between Word 2010 and Best Authority back in May. They requested the Office 2010 beta early on and were able to finalize their integration before the Suite was launched.

Kenneth Pendergast, VP for Development and Support at Levit & James, said, “Office 2010 comes in 2 versions: a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. Microsoft is recommending against deploying the 64-bit version until the desktop environment is more amenable to its use. Consequently, Best Authority version 2.x will only support the 32-bit version of Office 2010. The 64-bit version will be supported in Best Authority 3.x, which will be a dotNET-based implementation.”

When asked whether most firms will implement Office 2010 within the 12 months, Pendergast projected, “Historically, law firms have tended to leapfrog versions of Microsoft Office. However, just as many firms delayed or avoided Vista, and are now looking to Windows 7. Many of them, even those running Office XP, have avoided Office 2007, due to the high-impact nature of the cutover and the long wait for compatible third-party apps. Some of the biggest annoyances of 2007 have been fixed in 2010, and we expect that the majority of firms on Office 2003 or older versions will now make the transition pretty quickly. On the other hand, firms who have recently arrived at 2007 will probably skip 2010 and wait for the subsequent version.”

Another longtime player in the legal technology field is World Software Corporation®, makers of Worldox® DMS. Worldox GX2, the newest version of the product, currently has full integration with Office 2010. Product Manager Chris Dohnert notes that “achieving integration with Office 2010 was very similar to the process we followed for Office 2007. We needed to update our Macros and Hooks to handle the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Publisher. The biggest change was to handle the new ribbon bar in Outlook and properly add our Worldox Move and Copy e-mail buttons to the new ribbon.”

Dohnert thinks that most firms will indeed decide to implement Office 2010 within the next year. He says, “Many sites are still running Office 2003 and are due for update. Also, the improvements made to the Outlook interface should drive customers to it as well. Many firms have held off upgrading systems because Vista was problematic and so is the economy. Now that Windows 7 is out and seemingly resolves the issues with Vista, firms are looking to upgrade both workstations and Office software at the same time.”

Training can also be a major issue for law firms to contend with, and productivity loss is one of the biggest downsides of any technology implementation. Flournoy says her firm’s Office 2010 training will consist of “concise, focused, short training sessions.” Dohnert says that “the culture shock to the users is, as ever, an issue. Those firms that invested in user training before the rollouts of 2007 and now 2010 are seeing fewer problems. I know a firm in the UK that purchased an add-on product that makes Word 2007 look exactly like Word 2003 just to circumvent the re-learning process for those users who found it difficult to adapt.”

The learning curve is always a stumbling block, especially when lawyers and staffers are resistant to spending time in training classrooms since it subtracts from their billable hours. Fortunately, with eLearning solutions being readily available from many vendors and developed internally at many law firms, the training burden is a bit more portable and is accessible 24/7.

Nobody likes change, even when it represents a major improvement. Office 2010 seems to be regarded as a helpful, fairly innocuous upgrade that carries with it some nostalgia (the File Menu) which will smooth out any still-ruffled feathers from 2007, and some shiny new bells and whistles, too. Many legal software vendors, like those mentioned above, have already made their applications compatible with 2010, though others are still scrambling to finish the integrations. Deciding whether to upgrade to Office 2010 is truly an individual decision for each firm, but it seems clear that the buzz on 2010 is relatively positive overall.

For an official list of what’s new in MS Office 2010, visit: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/.