14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is notorious for eating its own dog food, a process labeled as dogfooding, which involves a company using its own products. In this regard, all of its software is used internally from the earliest stages of development, with heavyweights such as Windows and Office gaining a consistent level of traction well before they are officially launched on the market. Dogfooding does by no means stop when new products hit RTM, with the company continuing to run its own software. Case in point: Office 2010.
Microsoft deployed the various Builds (including RTM) of Office 2010 internally, to in excess of 100,000 computers. Furthermore, the software giant summarized its Office 2010 adoption efforts into a whitepaper it made available for download free of charge. Companies looking to embrace Office 2010 at scale should have their IT admins take a look at the “Deploying the Office 2010 Client at Microsoft” guide, and get an account of how the firm pulled it off. It appears that Microsoft IT leveraged nothing more than Microsoft Deployment technologies in order to put Office 2010 RTM on the computers of over 100,000 of its workers.
“For the Office 2010 deployment, Microsoft IT followed an internal model similar to the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Team Model for Operations. This model offers guidelines for various processes, such as software development, deployment, and other functions related to IT operations. The members of the teams organized under the MOF team model share responsibilities to focus tightly on the project at hand. Although the size and depth of the teams may vary with the extent of the operation, the best practices and lessons learned from each phase carry over to the next phase. This method helps ensure that the total cost of repeated deployments stays manageable,” the company stated.
According to the software giant, a few different groups were involved in the early Office 2010 deployments, including Microsoft IT, the Office 2010 product group, LOB application developers, and Microsoft employees worldwide. The firm revealed that it had passed the 100,000 Office 2010 installations by the time the product hit RTM earlier this year.
“Due to the careful planning and cross-team effort, as well as the technical savvy and eagerness of Microsoft employees, early adoption of Office 2010 was a success. This early adoption helped validate the functionality and features of Office 2010, in addition to the tools and processes used during deployment. It also provided the compatibility testing of all Microsoft Office-dependent LOB applications. The successful testing of the deployment in a real-world environment offers lessons for IT customers and solution partners so that they can simplify the process and reduce the costs associated with planning and conducting an Office 2010 deployment,” Microsoft concluded.
Office Home and Business 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
Office Home and Student 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
Office Professional 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.
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