Compare server integration features between Office suites available through volume licensing
Office Standard provides access to many of the server integration features, but Office Professional Plus offers more advanced features and an enhanced user experience. Also, in many cases, Office Professional Plus is required to initiate a process or apply policies. However, users of either suite can participate in processes or consume content.
Information Rights Management (IRM) and policy capabilities
Safeguard digital information from unauthorized use through integration with Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) for Windows Server. Give users the ability to define exactly who can open, modify, print, forward, and/or take other actions with documents and e-mail messages.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| Create IRM-protected documents and e-mail messages. Grant access and editing permissions and apply policy templates to protected content. | |  |
| Read and use IRM-protected documents and e-mail messages, given appropriate rights. Now, even outside organizations with their own RMS server can be federated to receive protected content. | | |
| Apply policy statements to e-mail messages before sending. | | |
| Read policy statements associated with received e-mail messages. | | |
Contextual access to business and social networking
Get a people-centric view of your company, including messages, meeting schedules, attachments, and SharePoint activities—such as the posting of status updates directly within Outlook. And connect to popular social networking sites to get news from customers, prospects, and partners.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| See a people-centric view including messages, meeting schedules, attachments, and SharePoint activities –such as new document postings and status updates—on MySites, from within Outlook 2010 through the new Outlook Social Connector. | | |
| Gain a people-centric view of recently shared messages and meetings from within Outlook 2010 through the new Outlook Social Connector. IT can also configure connections to internally developed or popular third-party Internet social networking tools built using the Outlook Social Connector SDK. | | |
Publish data insights
Publish worksheets with strong fidelity to the Web, and create Web databases with Excel Services and Access Services through SharePoint 2010. The Report Center helps ensure that all users have access to the same version of critical business information.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| Share analyses and results—including Excel 2010 workbooks with Sparklines and Slicers—across the organization by using Excel Services to publish workbooks and dashboards to the Web. | | |
| View shared analysis and reports on the Web that were created with Excel Services. | | |
| Create Web databases in Access 2010, host them on SharePoint, and enable them to be fully accessible through a Web browser with Access Services. | | |
| Open Web forms and reports that were created in Access 2010 with a Web browser. Make changes that will be automatically synchronized with the database. | | |
| Publish Excel 2010 workbooks to SharePoint that were created with PowerPivot for Excel 2010, a free Web download that can quickly calculate data sets of millions of rows from multiple sources. PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010 enables Web-based analysis through Excel Services or the Excel Web App. | | |
Unified instant messaging, presence, and voice
Easily communicate with others in different locations or time zones using familiar Office tools. Communicator and Office Communications Server operate with popular Office programs to provide a range of different communication options, including instant messaging (IM), phone, and voice, video, or Web conferencing.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| See the availability of others—via author indicators when co-authoring to the address field when composing an e-mail—from directly within Office applications through Office Communications Server. | | |
| Initiate IM and voice directly from Office applications, through integration with Office Communications Server. Point to an author’s or manager’s name in File Properties—available from the Info tab in Backstage view—to surface a contact card and initiate a voice or IM conversation. | | |
| Record and listen to name pronunciation recordings wherever presence is found with the new contact card, which includes a recording tied to the user's voice-mail box for name pronunciation. | | |
| Have IT staff configure MailTips to give users of Outlook 2010 and Exchange Server 2010 important information before they click Send to avoid distributing messages to inappropriate recipients. For example, users can be notified that they are about to send a message outside the organization or are using Reply All. | | |
| Take advantage of voice-mail transcripts that are now sent directly to a user's inbox along with the recording. The Microsoft's voice-to-text engine automatically transcribes a text preview of recorded messages. | | |
Integrated Enterprise Content Management
Provide secure access to business information through operability with SharePoint. Includes differentiated capabilities from integrated document workflow and to smart templates that populate document metadata and easy access to rich client/server capabilities within the Backstage view.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| Initiate document workflows and complete workflow tasks from within the Microsoft Office applications. | | |
| Initiate document workflows and complete workflow tasks from a Web browser. | | |
| Use new Metadata Picker to select terms from both organization-defined taxonomies and user-generated folksonomy with autocomplete and disambiguation. | | |
| Save documents directly to SharePoint from within Office applications, using the new Backstage view. | | |
| Publish presentations and individual PowerPoint 2010 slides to slide libraries for later reuse. | | |
| Browse slide libraries from within PowerPoint 2010, build new presentations from individual slides, and get updates when slides change on the server. | | |
| Publish spreadsheets to the Report Center and specify parameters and viewing permissions for spreadsheets and specific cells that are published to Report Center. | | |
| View and use spreadsheets published to the Report Center from a Web browser. | | |
| Create printable labels and barcodes from metadata and insert barcodes and labels into Microsoft Office documents. | | |
| Read, print, and update existing labels and barcodes in Microsoft Office documents. | | |
Managed e-mail folders and retention policy
Use a variety of tools and features that improve your organization’s ability to maintain compliance with document retention policies—from accessible document creation to e-mail retention.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| Provide a secondary location for users to store their e-mail messages and manage their mailbox quota with new online managed folders. Unlike local Outlook Data Files (PSTs), this information can be backed up and managed by Exchange Server. | | |
| Take advantage of retention policies so that IT administrators and records managers can provide users with policies stipulating how long items should be retained. Users can apply these policies to items and folders to comply with your organization’s overall records-management policy. | | |
Integrated electronic forms
Improve data collection processes through integration between InfoPath 2010 and other core applications and back-end systems. E-mail forms, developer enhancements, the Document Information Panel, and a seamless online/offline experience enhance the quality of the data that is collected and reduce errors.
| Office Standard | Office Professional Plus |
| Extend InfoPath forms to Internet browsers and mobile devices for use in SharePoint-enabled business workflows and other areas. Designers also have more options to create InfoPath forms; for example, they use SharePoint regular or external lists to automatically generate forms. | | |
| Complete, collect, and organize InfoPath 2010 e-mail forms in Outlook 2007. | | |
| Host embedded, fully customizable InfoPath forms in Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2007. | | |
| Complete forms in Programmable Task Panes. | | |
| Complete custom fields and execute custom business logic in Document Information Panel forms. | | |
