New features in Office 2010 improve document sharing with SharePoint 2010. However, organizations will have to upgrade current installations to the latest versions of Office and SharePoint to get all the new features.

Expertise in Microsoft licensing requires, besides an extraordinary appetite for detail and fine print, knowing where the rules live. Even those who aren't licensing experts still need to live by the rules, and there is no single "Bible of Microsoft Licensing" that contains them all in a clear, navigable format.

As with all OS updates, new and updated features in Windows Server 2008 R2 require testing to ensure compatibility with existing applications that will be migrated to the new OS.

Exchange Server 2010, available now as a release candidate with general availability planned for Nov. 2009, adds new features to help organizations archive data such as e-mail and voice mail messages, calendar items, and contacts.

For past and future customers managing servers with one or two processors, the changes are mostly price-neutral. However, some customers licensing larger servers will see substantial price increases, mostly in the form of rising future Software Assurance (SA) payments.

Top priorities for FY'10 include containing costs, preserving cash, and stopping the revenue slide in the Windows client business through more aggressive pricing. Partners and customers may have a harder time finding product information and presales support as Microsoft scales back sales and marketing budgets.

The shift from perpetual licenses that require a one-time payment to subscription licenses that require an annual payment is a major goal for Microsoft because of the ongoing (and often larger) revenue that they generate. Like most services, Microsoft Online Services are purchased as annual subscriptions that license services, users of those services, and sometimes devices that use services.

When Windows Server 2008 R2 is released in late 2009, it will include the second version of Hyper-V, Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization server role that makes it possible for multiple, different OS and application instances to coexist on a single physical computer by putting each instance in a virtual machine (VM).

With Windows 7, Microsoft continues to evolve the licensing rules for the product. Some changes will save customers money, others will increase costs, and customers will need to take them into account in planning any migration or upgrade strategies. Downgrade rights to the most popular current business OS, Windows XP, will be affected, and the company is wrapping most of its remote and virtualized desktop offerings into an extra-cost add-on, Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop.

Four enterprise resource planning (ERP) product lines will continue to be developed despite tough economic times, according to plans released at Microsoft's 2009 Convergence conference. The four Dynamics lines—AX, NAV, GP, and SL—offer small and midsize organizations financial management functions integrated with operations such as production planning, human resources, and customer relationship management (CRM).