Users of the Office System will have to wait for at least a year before being able to get their hands on the successor of Office 2007. Codenamed Office 14, the next version of the productivity suite, officially branded Office 2010, is scheduled for RTM and GA in the first half of 2010. Microsoft failed to pinpoint the specific dates at which it plans to release Office 2010 to manufacturing, or the general availability deadline, leaving itself a tad of elbow room. Still, the Redmond company will serve the first taste of Office 2010 by the end of this year, according to Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group.

“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,” Capossela revealed.

The promise from Microsoft is that the next iteration of the Office System will come to respond to the needs of modern users. In this regard, Office 2010 will be tailored to the way technology is leveraged by businesses and end users in order to support remote working scenarios, anywhere access, increased flexibility, advanced remote management, cost reductions and regulatory compliance.

“With these new products we are giving people a familiar interface across PCs, mobile phones and browsers to make it even easier for them to create, communicate and collaborate from any location. IT professionals will benefit from a choice of new delivery and new licensing models as well as from improved management options to better control costs, and enhanced security across all locations. And through our integrated infrastructure, businesses can more easily deploy, manage and help secure corporate assets and comply with government regulations,” Capossela added.

At the same time, Microsoft will continue to focus on Office 2010 as a platform. Codenamed Office 14, the product will act as an underlying layer for developers to provide extensions to customers, with the Redmond company indicating that it will work to cut development cycles, and to drive application interoperability. “We are working on open APIs and deep support for industry standards, and at the same time, we are expanding our developer tool support, all toward making developers’ lives significantly easier,” Capossela explained.

Office 2010 will be the first version of the Microsoft productivity suite to stretch into the Cloud. This will be possible through the Office Web apps, a set of solutions designed to complement Office 2010, while permitting end users to do much more than what Office Live allows today in terms of document handling.