WPC Office 2010 announcements in short

WPC day one keynote was quite a feast. Here are the highlights regarding Office 2010, perhaps the most awaited announcement.

  • Number of new features were demonstrated. Check out Paul Thurrottā€™s nice preview article, but here are some of my picks:
    • Support for multiple simultaneous users editing a single Office document
    • Ribbon UI for all the major applications
    • Outlook now threads your email conversations, allowing for easy ignoring, archiving and organizing
    • Excel has been further engineered for Business Intelligence purposes. Worksheets can now be ridiculously big, one benefit of shipping a 64-bit version of Office.
    • PowerPoint has been jazzed up to contain features such as video editing, new visual effects and so on. A new possibility: Streaming a PowerPoint slide deck to viewers around the world and across platforms through a SharePoint server.
    • Groove client has been renamed as SharePoint Workspace 2010, turning it into an offline SharePoint client. The implications (or just ā€œcomplicationsā€) on SharePoint customization work remain to be uncovered.
  • Support for using Office 2010 on three platforms: The client Windows, the Web and the phone.
    • Web versions of at least Word, Excel and PowerPoint will be available. While the exact feature set is yet to be announced, they seem to succeed in providing an editing experience that would, in the most common cases, be pretty much on par with the client one.
    • Consumers will get the Web versions free through Windows Live, corporations can use Microsoft Online Services or in the case of Volume Licensing customers, host the online versions on their own premises.
  • Packaging: 8 suites will be organized into five. OneNote will be present in each of them, a radical change from Office 2007.
  • A limited Technical Preview launches now, but doesnā€™t cover the web apps yet. A public beta will be available during the fall.
  • The release date is expected to be somewhere close to a year from now.

More details and eye candy can be seen in Scobleā€™s videos.

As for the server end, SharePoint 2010 will come to beta as well, but it will be months later. The major information load is expected at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in October. A sneak preview site has been launched. Iā€™ll cover the SharePoint 2010 story later on when I get time to dig down on all the new material.

July 13, 2009 Ā· Jouni Heikniemi Ā· One Comment
Tags: ,  Ā· Posted in: General

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