GA is just four months away

Feb 13, 2010 12:00 GMT  ·  By

Office 2010 Release Candidate Build 14.0.4734.1000 follows Beta Build 14.0.4536.1000 and the Technical Preview development milestones offered in 2009. The first build of Office 2010 this year signals the fact that Microsoft is approaching the finishing line with its next generation of the productivity suite. Third-party sources indicate that the company is planning to RTM Office 2010 in April 2010. The software giant only confirmed that Office 2010 General Availability was set for June, with sources claiming that it settled on June 15 for the launch of the productivity suite.

According to data from Microsoft, the public Beta of Office 2010 managed to attract a huge number of workers. “Although Office 2010 is in Beta and is not final, we are both excited and humbled by the fact that more than 2.5 million people have downloaded and used the Beta. We want to make sure you have a great experience with Office 2010. If you are using the Office 2010 Beta, take a moment to download this important fix,” noted a member of the Office 2010 Engineering team.

Build 14.0.4734.1000

I’m currently test driving Build 14.0.4734.1000 of Office 2010 and the latest development milestone of the next generation Microsoft productivity suite is rather impressive. Even though the product is at least a few months away from finalization, it certainly already feels like a wrapped up release. Testers will be able to tell that Microsoft is in the final stretch with Office 2010 and that the company is simply putting in the finishing touches on the successor of office 2007.

I have been running Office 2010 RC since it was offered to testers earlier this month, and so far I haven’t managed to find a new single bug. Of course, this doesn’t mean that problems are inexistent, it just means that Microsoft has managed to comb through the vast majority of issues already. From what I’m hearing, bug reports are not exactly pilling up at over a week since the Technical beta participants started, and problems reported are generally minor.

I want to quickly touch up on two aspects of Office 2010. The first is the revamped Ribbon/Fluent graphical users interface. Yes, customers still running Office 2003 or earlier will find it terribly confusing at first. Even users of Office 2007 will need to adapt to the new Ribbon user interface, albeit to a lesser degree. Adaptability is without a doubt key to embracing Office 2010.

The new Backstage menu, overhauled UI, the options shifted around have all contributed to negative reactions from end users. Even yours truly raised an eyebrow on more than one occasion. But the truth of the matter is that the Office 2010 Ribbon just needs a little time for users to adapt. The learning curve varies in accordance with each user, but it won’t take long before customers see the new core logic of the interface options, and will be able to intuitively find the options they need. And fact is that Ribbon no longer has users drill down and down in menus and submenus like the traditional Office 2003 UI. A consistent number of items that were previously hidden in various nooks and crannies of the old menus have been literally brought to the surface, kicking discoverability up a notch.

If given a chance, the Office 2010 Ribbon/Fluent UI will surprise users. Of course, old Office users will need to retain their reflexes after years of training them on releases such as Office 2003, and this is bound to make them less happy. Just as surely productivity will be impacted when customers start off. Companies will need to plan for this and compensate with training programs.

I did say two aspects; the second is related to performance. I haven’t run any benchmarks comparing Office 2010 RC to previous releases, but the Release Candidate indeed feels faster than the public Beta. When the new Office 2010 components are launched, they first present the user with a splash screen designed to take care of the transition to the fully operational program. With the Beta, testers got to see the 2010 splash screens for a few good seconds almost irrespective of component. In the Release Candidate Office 2010, apps launch extremely fast, not instantaneously, but certainly in less than a second, splash screen animation included.

One thing that I was particularly impressed with is the performance of Outlook 2010 RC. The email client grabbed over 1,000 emails from the server in a matter of seconds, and is still launching extremely fast, barely taking a toll on the system resources. I have hundreds of websites opened concomitantly in Internet Explorer 8 while simultaneously running Outlook 2010 and other Office 2010 applications on a daily basis, and I haven’t noticed a deterioration in performance. This, even though I have a modest 2GHz processor and only 3.3 GB of RAM. I’m also testing Office 2010 on a much powerful machine with a high end 3+GB processor and over 4 GB of RAM, and Office is simply lightning fast.

But I do see a potential problem with Office 2010. One that never occurred to me until a few Office customers and testers expressed it. According to Microsoft, there won’t be an upgrade path between the Release Candidate and the RTM version of Office 2010. Some customers that are testing Office 2010 full time asked me whether they would be able to simply slap the RTM bits on top of the Release Candidate when Office 2010 becomes available for purchase. They expressed disappointment to hear that the answer is no.

“This Release Candidate is intended for testing only. There is NO ‘upgrade’ path from this release to any future releases of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 including the final ‘RTM’ release. All pre-released applications will need to be uninstalled before any future releases, including the final ‘RTM’ release, can be installed. Additionally, all data and customizations created in the beta and release candidate versions of SharePoint products will be lost when moving to the final ‘RTM’ release of SharePoint 2010,” the company noted in the email message sent to members of the Technical Preview program.

Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.

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