Courtesy of Microsoft

May 4, 2010 08:54 GMT  ·  By

With Office 2010 released to manufacturing on April 15th, 2010, and already available for purchase to businesses, customers looking to embrace the latest version of the productivity suite can also access free resources from Microsoft, designed to streamline adoption. Almost a month ago, the Redmond company made available for download “Deployment Options for Microsoft Office 2010,” and, now, the Microsoft Download Center is offering the “Deployment guide for Office 2010.” Both resources can be grabbed free of charge straight from the Redmond company.

“This book provides how-to information: the recommended steps to execute specific deployment tasks, such as customizing the installation, installing Microsoft Office 2010 system on users' computers, implementing the deployment in many languages, and migrating to the new file format. The audiences for this book are IT professionals who plan, implement, and maintain Office installations in their organizations,” an excerpt from the abstract of the “Deployment guide for Office 2010” reads.

Of course, as it is generally the case with such resources, content from the deployment guide can also be accessed online, via the Office 2010 Resource Kit on TechNet. In this regard, the downloadable guide will best come in handy to IT professionals in offline scenarios. And there are over 200 pages of information on how to deploy Office 2010 across an organization, with particular topics related to Microsoft Application Virtualization, Group Policy, System Center Essentials 2010, System Center Configuration Manager 2007, SharePoint Workspace 2010, Volume Activation, etc.

For example, the first section of the guide “provides how-to information for specific deployment tasks, such as customizing the installation, and installing Microsoft Office 2010 on users' computers. It also provides information about the new licensing options for Office 2010, including instructions for configuring the infrastructure for volume licensing and activation,” Microsoft notes.

Office 2010 RTM is already available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Volume license users both with and without Software Assurance can also buy Office 2010 RTM from Microsoft. However, the successor of Office 2007 will only hit store shelves in June 2010.