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Today Microsoft unveiled an invited beta program for Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14):
Today, at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, Microsoft Corp. announced that Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. Starting today, tens of thousands of people will be invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program.
It’s a private beta limited to invitees, the beta code will apparently not be available until August, and the final products won’t be available until the first half of 2010. You can find out about the usual incremental Office improvements at the Office 2010 Web site, but the biggest buzz is about the Web versions tentatively named Office Web applications (although Microsoft is looking for a new name):
Office Web applications — the lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that provide access to documents from virtually anywhere and preserve the look and feel of a document regardless of device.
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The company also announced that Office Web applications will be available in three ways: through Windows Live, where more than 400 million consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost; on-premises for all Office volume licensing customers including more than 90 million Office annuity customers; and via Microsoft Online Services, where customers will be able to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering.
So Microsoft has bitten the bullet and will go free on the Web version of their Office cash cow and the lines are drawn with Google Apps and the other free online office software competitors. Of course, Microsoft really didn’t have much choice if they wanted anyone to pay attention. Stay tuned for a raft of side-by-side comparisons and feature wrangling among the players.
S. Somasegar, Senior VP of the Microsoft Developer Division, broke the news yesterday that the first beta of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 has been released:
Today, we are releasing Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download the Beta today from here. For the rest of the world, the Beta will be publicly available on Wednesday.
Over the last many months I had blogged about a lot of new and interesting features that are in VS 2010 and .NET 4. You can see those features and many more in Beta 1. We have more work to do in terms of finishing up the feature work for some of the scenarios and getting to the right levels of quality and performance, but we have made enough progress that we wanted to start getting your feedback.
There is more on the new features in VS 2010 at the product page, but my nominee for the most important "sleeper" feature is the array of SharePoint development features which appeal to the burgeoning SharePoint developer market.
Microsoft today announced the availability of Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. What’s in it for Office 2007 users?
Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics.
On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser.
Also, having a wider array of file-format choices should really benefit customers. With SP2, Office 2007 now has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats that were already supported in Office 2007.
Office 2007 users can download SP2 right away or wait for it via Microsoft Update where it will appear "no sooner than three months from now, and with at least 30 days notice."
Microsoft is rolling out the PR for Office 2010 (formerly Office 14) and Exchange 2010:
We’re announcing that Microsoft will begin releasing new versions of Office-related products this year. Exchange 2010 will be the first product in this lineup, entering beta for customers to download today. Exchange 2010 will become available in the second half of 2009. Office 2010 — including Office Web applications, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 — will enter a technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010.
So what goodies does Microsoft have for users of Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 (which reportedly will have both 32 and 64-bit versions)? Well, that’s a bit hard to discern amidst the flummery, but beyond the improved Outlook Web Access Webmail client, one other theme seems clear:
IT professionals will have more flexibility and choice to simplify deployment and lower management costs, while maintaining control. For example, Exchange 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 give users the same value whether deployed on-premises, as a service from Microsoft and industry partners, or a mix of both.
As for the Exchange 2010 beta:
Exchange 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products and is the first server in a new generation of Microsoft server technology built from the ground up to work on-premises and as an online service. This release of Exchange 2010 introduces a new integrated e-mail archive and features to help reduce costs and improve the user experience. A public beta of the server is available for download starting today at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010.
There is a full laundry list of new Exchange 2010 features at the link, not a few of which are rather obscure.
