14 DAY TRIAL // The Technical Preview of Office 2010 is live, Microsoft confirmed at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 in New Orleans. With the Community Technology Preview, the next iteration of the Office System hits its first major milestone. But it's not just Office 2010, it's also SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010, as Microsoft informed since it announced that the Technology preview was planned to debut in July. The Redmond-based company revealed that it planned to release Office 2010 to manufacturing in the first half of 2010. For the time being, tens of thousands of testers will be invited to get a taste of Office 2010 and Visio 2010 Technical Preview.
“Office 2010 is the premier productivity solution across PCs, mobile phones and browsers,” said Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft. “From broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualization capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word, we are delivering technology to help people work smarter and faster from virtually any location using any device.”
As an integral part of the evolution of the Office System, Microsoft will stretch the productivity suite into the Cloud beyond everything that was made available with previous releases of Office. In this context, Office 2010 will be accompanied by what the company referred to as Office Web applications. The Office Web apps are designed as lightweight variants of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote set up to run in the browser. Although the software giant will demonstrate the apps at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, the company will only start testing them in August 2009.
Co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 are among the new features brought to the table with the release of Office 2010 Technical Preview that will streamline collaboration along with advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities of Outlook 2010. PowerPoint 2010 gets new video and picture editing, broadcast capability, while Excel 2010 users will be able to enjoy Sparklines, a new feature that will allow data visualization and trends analysis.
“Microsoft also announced that it is streamlining the number of Office editions from eight to five and enhancing each edition with additional applications and features. 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,” the company noted.