When do i need Office 2010 with SharePoint 2010

A question i hear from a lot of customers is:

Do i need to update/upgrade to Office 2010 when upgrading to SharePoint 2010 ? Most companies don’t want to update (again) and tell there users a new version of Office will be installed.

What you need to know is: Which features of SharePoint 2010 require Office 2010. If that is known you can decide to upgrade to Office 2010, or to postpone this upgrade.

• Open, edit, and save documents using Office Web Apps
• View and update SharePoint ’ s managed keywords and tags
• Display SharePoint’s managed keywords and tags within the actual document
• Navigate by keywords when browsing existing Office documents
• Reduced protection of documents using Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM)
• Reduced ability to add digital signatures with Microsoft IMS
• Restrict editing per user with Microsoft IMS
• Allow co-authoring of an Office document in realtime
• Offline access to SharePoint content with SharePoint Workspace
• Integrate Microsoft Access applications in SharePoint

If these features are not required or a not important at first, you can decide not to upgrade to office 2010.at least not at first. you can always decide later to upgrade.

Hope this information will help others to decide if an upgrade is needed.

regards,

Eric