For most small and midsized businesses, Microsoft Office is the standard for productivity applications. So the arrival of Microsoft 2010, which is now going into beta for release next year, is big news.

Indeed, the new version brings lots of upgrades big and small. After testing beta version for several weeks, it's clear that Office 2010 has plenty of features and enhancements of interest to SMBs -- and this slideshow will highlight more than a dozen of them.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, tha may no longer be the issue. Today's question is whether Microsoft is building the world's best battleship at the dawn of the age of the aircraft carrier.

That is, even as it makes Office 2010 by the far the most robust office suite on the market -- and begins to experiment with online features and sharing -- is that really what SMBs are looking for?

Are these features compelling enough to keep SMBs spending on a high-end office suite? Or do small and midsize companies just want something good enough, cheap enough, and compatible enough to do the jobs they need?

Time will tell, but in the meantime check out our look at some of the most important SMB-related features in the 2 (out of 5) versions of Office 2010 that Microsoft is pitching to small and midsize businesses:

Microsoft Home And Office 2010 includes Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote

Microsoft Office Professional 2010 adds Access and Publisher.

There are important features in other versions -- such as Sharepoint Workspace and Outlook with Business Contact Manager -- but as usual, bMighty concentrates on the SMB products.

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Love it or hate it, Gmail's use of the "conversation" metaphor instead of folders was a big change for e-mail. Outlook 2010 borrows the concept, and actually improves on it in couple of ways.

First of all Conversation View is an option for particular e-mail messages, not your only choice for dealing with your inbox. It's designed to help users clean up the large volumes of e-mail they get. (Microsoft says the average person gets 1,800 e-mails per month, and deletes 1,500 of them.)

Many of those e-mails come as part of endless threads on which you're cc:ed but not interested. You can select Conversation View to deal with the mess, condensing the thread to a single line, Gmail style, while leaving the rest of your inbox as is. It even works when some messages in the thread are in other folders.

Better still, you can "Ignore" a conversation and Outlook 2010 automatically deletes all messages in the thread -- and even deletes new messages that come in to it.

Outlook 2010 also adds a new Protected View that opens Microsoft Office docs you receive via e-mail in a special "sandbox" where they can't harm your system. You can view the document, but have to mark it as "Safe" to edit it. Once marked Safe, it's trusted from then on and opens normally.

Best of all, the IT department can manage which sources and file types trigger Protected View.

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There are plenty of third-party applications out there that let you share your desktop with one or more other folks, but if you just want to quickly share a PowerPoint presentation, all you need is Office 2010.

Under the Slide Show tab in PowerPoint, the Broadcast Slide Show button lets you instantly create a unique URL that will display the presentation in real time as you move through it. You can then e-mail the URL to whoever you want to see the show. (Note, you can also get to Broadcast Slide Show from the new Backstage View.)

You need either SharePoint Foundation Services or a free Windows Live account ID to use the feature, but it's remarkably quick and easy, and it's all done from right in PowerPoint.

Viewers can't download the presentation, of course, and it's available only as long as you're in Broadcast mode. But they can view it full screen, and you can save the presentation as a video for later viewing.

Ultimately, just by virtue of being built into PowerPoint, Broadcast Slide Show is likely to find lots of uses for small and midsize companies looking to connect with remote employees, customers, prospects, and suppliers.

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Continuing the theme of building in features that used to require other applications, PowerPoint 2010 has dramatically extended the amount of video and image editing you can do right in the program.

PowerPoint 2010 supports AVI, WMV, WMA, MP3, MOV, and H.264 formats, and you can set where the video starts and ends, insert bookmarks, and add fades and formatting effects. You can even trigger PowerPoint animations from specific places in the video.

These aren't terribly sophisticated features for a real video-editing program, and there are many free video apps available. And you'll still want to complete major video editing work before importing your clips into PowerPoint.

But having at least some video-editing capability actually in PowerPoint 2010 itself can save time-consuming steps if it turns out that you need to make changes in the way the clip works with your presentation.

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Getting information about the properties of a document and a clear list of the things you can do with it has always been harder than it should be in Microsoft Office.

Office 2010 makes big strides in fixing that with the Backstage View. Just click on the File tab that replaces the Orb (or Jewel) in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and you get a full-page, behind-the-scenes look at your document. It's very different from a pull-down menu, but it won't take long to get used to.

The information supplied varies slightly from app to app. Word docs give you file Size, Pages, Words, Total Editing Time, Title, Tags, and Comments, as well as Author and Last Modified By. You also get dates the doc was Created, Last Modified, and Last Printed. While PowerPoint, for example, tells you the Number of Slides and Hidden Slides.

And all the apps use Backstage to let you set options for Permissions and Sharing (using e-mail, SharePoint, or SkyDrive -- online storage, etc.), as well as Versions control. Print preview is also available, and much improved with real-time previews of the options you select.

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Exchange 2010 adds new features to PivotCharts, making filtering independent of a task PivotTable and adding new interactive buttons.

Slicers are separate objects that let you filter multiple PivotTables or PivotCharts -- on the fly. The Slicer updates automatically when you change the underlying PivotTables or PivotCharts. You can use drawiing-style formatting options to add Shape Effects or quickly change the overall format using Slicer Styles. You can move and resize Slicers anywhere on the worksheet. Slicers live in the PivotTable Tools Options tab, in the Sort & Filter group and in the PivotChart Tools Analyze tab, in the Data group.

Sparklines are tiny charts that fit within a single cell to graphically display information about the data. You can format Sparklines as itty-bitty bar charts or line graphs, and you can use contrasting colors to call out high and low points in the data. You can set Sparklines to be consistent throughout a worksheet or format each one independently. Sparklines are accessed Sparklines from the Insert tab in the ribbon.

Microsoft is also debuting a free PowerPivot add-on for Excel 2010 designed to help deal with extremely large data sets. Formerly known as Project Gemini, PowerPivot lets you manipulate millions of rows of data into a single Excel workbook.

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While bMighty was not able to fully test Microsoft's claims of improved security and performance in Office 2010, the company says it has made big strides in both areas.

Microsoft claims Office 2010 delivers better performance on both new and existing PC hardware. Initial experience with the beta version didn't create a vastly different experience than Office 2007, but things seemed snappy enough on a middle-of-the-road HP laptop running Windows 7.

Specifically, Microsoft says that the apps now load faster, and that charting performance in Excel has been improved, among other changes.

Microsoft also says it has added layered defenses to Office 2010, but what exactly does that mean?

In addition to the Protected View Office 2010 improves the handling of Trusted Documents by letting you stop those annoying security prompts for workbooks you have already marked as Trusted. The Trust Center is now an Option in the Backstage View.

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Word 2010 adds a new Navigation pane -- available in the View menu -- that shows an outline of your document by headings. (Obviously, this works only if your document uses headings styles, a subtle encouragement to format your documents by the rules...) You can also get a page-by-page outline, and use it to jump to the page -- or paragraph or section -- you want.

The Navigation Pane also lets you change the change organization of the document right in the Pane instead of in the document itself. You can change the level of individual sections, move sections around with the document, and create new sections. It can be much easier to make gross changes like this in the Navigation Pane than in the document itself when working with long, multi-page documents.

The Navigation Pane also holds a search input field that searches that document only. The Pane shows each search hit in context, and also highlights your search terms in the document itself.

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Many of the apps in Office 2010 have upgraded their ability to modify images right in the application. Most important, you can now crop images in place, complete with pan and zoom capabilities. That's a big deal because you often can't tell exactly how you need to crop an image until it's actually on the page. Similarly, some Office 2010 apps support live preview, which shows you the effects of your changes in real time, before you commit to completing the action.

You can also do more to change backgrounds and colors, choose from among a larger selection of borders and frames, and add "artistic" effects like paint strokes or pixelation. You can even change the shapes of your images in new ways, from trapezoids to triangles.

Office 2010 also includes the ability compress images and to do color correction, as well as sharpen and soften effects.

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Outlook's ability to send and accept invites to meetings is one of modern business' great conveniences. Many SMBs would be lost without this essential feature. Yet it's often a pain to figure out whether you should accept a meeting invitation or whether you have a conflict at the proposed time.

Outlook 2010 helps solve this problem. When you get an invite, it pops up a mini preview of that portion of your calendar -- showing when meeting is and what else you might have scheduled for that time.

Not having to switch back and forth from e-mail to calendar views can greatly speed the process of deciding whether or not to take a meeting. Sometimes, you can solve a conflict just by moving the meeting a half hour forward or back, but you can't tell that unless you hop back and forth between views.

Not a big change, but potentially a significant time saver.

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Perhaps the most-hyped component of Office 2010 is the availability of online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The promise has been to let users view, edit, and share their documents in any modern Web browser -- on any PC, Mac, or Linux device -- while retaining fidelity in terms of formatting. In fact, Microsoft Web apps promise round-trip format fidelity, so that if you create a document in Office 2010 on the desktop, edit it on the Web version, and then send it back to the desktop, the formatting will remain in place.

That's a big deal, as that formatting can sometimes be lost when working with even ostensibly compatible office suites like Google Apps, Zoho, or OpenOffice.org.

The online versions of Office 2010 also promise advanced sharing and collaboration features, even with people who use earlier versions of Office or a different productivity suite.

Unfortunately, development of the online functionality isn't as complete as in the desktop beta version, so it's impossible to fully evaluate these Web apps. But initial impressions were a bit disappointing. The online feature sets were a mere shadow of the desktop capabilities, though at least the layout and presentation were similar to the desktop beta. Performance of the test environment Microsoft made available was surprisingly sluggish, and navigating the online environment was often confusing. Creating a document, for example, didn't seem possible, even though it was relatively easy to import documents.

Note: Business users will require SharePoint Foundation Services to use the Web apps, while individuals can get by with a free Windows Live account.

Bottom line? Even as Office 2010 on the desktop clearly outclasses the competition, the online apps still have some serious catching up to do.

The separate Office Mobile 2010 product, meanwhile, offers some of the same functionality, and also promises to preserve formatting, on Windows Mobile devices. bMighty was not able to test Office Mobile 2010.

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The previous pages cover some of the biggest changes in Office 2010. But as in any new release of this magnitude, there are a large number of smaller tweaks and updates that collectively make a big difference in the power and usability of the apps.

Here are a few highlights of the more subtle or limited improvements in Office 2010 that may mean a lot to some SMBs:

The splash screens for Office 2010 apps now have a "Cancel" button in the lower right corner. Apparently, users often open the wrong app by mistake, and this gives them a way out without having to wait for the app to completely load.

OpenType fonts give you detailed control of the how letters look when design is critical. You can use alternate versions of specific letterforms that vary in context, such as whether they fall at the beginning or end of a sentence, after specific other letters (ligatures), and so on. OpenType also gives you precise control over kerning, or the spaces between individual letters.

Excel Search Filters make it easier to hone in on what you'r looking for. Results appear as soon as you start typing your search term, and you can narrow your results by deselecting things you don't want to see.

Microsoft has added letters to the desktop icons for the various apps, making it easier to tell which one is which. Of course, both PowerPoint and Publisher both use a "P" while One Note uses an "N" instead of an "O." Still, it's better than nothing.

Other tweaks include Customizable Ribbons -- and the ability to export customizations as XML files to create a consistent experience across your company. Neutral Color Palette -- Microsoft has gone with a white background instead of color gradients to improve readability. New PowerPoint Transitions -- including ripple, flip, doors, switch, honeycomb, shred, vortex, and more. They're slick, but a little goes a long way. Improvements In SmartArt -- let you apply effects to document text, so you can still edit and spell check it. Paste With Live Preview -- some Office 2010 apps let you see your paste options before you finalize the action. Manage Multiple Exchange Accounts -- let you connect multiple Exchange mailboxes in a single Outlook profile. Outlook Quick Steps -- let you build macros to speed common tasks like forwarding an e-mail and deleting the original. Outlook Social Connector -- is a centralized view that includes e-mail threads, status updates, and files and photos from social networks like FaceBook and LinkedIn. It's cool, but free Outlook add-ins like Xobni already offer this functionality.

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