Office 2010 GA next week

Jun 8, 2010 13:49 GMT  ·  By

After hundreds of thousands of testers took the Technical Preview development milestone out for a spin, Microsoft has now kicked off the roll-out of the free Office 2010 Cloud components to users around the world. For the time being, all users in the US, the UK, Canada, and Ireland can access Office Web Apps on Windows Live SkyDrive. Of course, Microsoft has just started introducing an important side of Office 2010 to the world, and is bound to unveil even more come next week, when the successor of Office 2007 reaches the General Availability milestone on June 15th, Jason Moore, principal lead program manager, Windows Live SkyDrive, notes.

“If you live in the US, UK, Canada, or Ireland, you can head over to Office.live.com today to start viewing and editing Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote documents right in your web browser – and share them with your friends,” Moore added. “If you don’t live in one of those regions, you can still get access. You might not get the Web Apps in your favorite language yet, as we are still rolling out updates to different regions. Note that people you share documents with may also need to visit the link above before they can access the documents you share with them.”

Office Web Apps allows users to create, view, edit, share and collaborate on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents in the Cloud. On SkyDrive, users have 25 GB of free storage space to fill with documents, and they can easily upload files to their accounts. Provided that Silverlight is installed on their machines, customers can leverage the drag-and-drop functionality to batch-upload Office docs.

Customers will need nothing more than their browser to access Office Web Apps and use the documents stored online. All the action happens on Microsoft’s servers. Beyond the browser, users don’t need anything else running locally on their computer. This, of course, allows for a great deal of flexibility, with customers being able to access their docs from anywhere, and most importantly from any device, including smartphones.

“And lots more. Across the board, we’ve worked to give you a smoother experience sharing and collaborating with others, with features such as sending and receiving instant messages using Messenger on the web, whether or not you have Messenger installed on your computer. To make sure you can share without worries, we’ve built in features like version history, which allows you to go back to older edits of your documents, and enhanced search, which lets you search across all your documents and those shared with you by others. Plus, when you’re done sharing, you can print your Word and PowerPoint documents right from the browser,” Moore said.