There are six versions of Office 2010: Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional, and Professional Plus. This Wikipedia chart outlines the differences among the six versions. Office Standard 2010 and Office Professional Plus 2010 will be available through TechSoup.

If your organization is already using Office 2007, then a transition to Office 2010 should be relatively easy: both products use the Ribbon interface, and both adhere to Microsoft’s Office Open XML  file formats. Like Office 2007, Office 2010 runs on Windows XP, Vista, and 7. According to Microsoft, any computer that can run Office 2007 can upgrade to Office 2010 with no hardware upgrades.

If possible, it’s best to upgrade everyone in your organization to a new version at once (remember that Microsoft allows you to request up to 50 donated licenses in a two-year period). If that’s not possible, then you may need to make some small adjustments or ignore some features.

Since Office 2007 and 2010 both use OOXML, staff running either version can share files, though there will be some slight cosmetic differences. If some of your staff is using Office 2003 or another office productivity suite, then Office 2010 users should adjust their default settings to save files in the older Office format. If some of your staff is using 2003 or 2007, then it won’t be possible for everyone in the organization to use the co-authoring features we discussed above (though anyone can use browser access to Office Web Apps).

New Features in Office Versions (H3)