Office for Mac 2011 Released to Manufacturing (RTM)

The next generation of Microsoft’s Office productivity suite designed for Apple’s Mac computers has reached a key milestone of the development process, RTM.

The past week, Office for Mac 2011 was released to manufacturing, which means that the Redmond company has wrapped up the product.

With the software giant having signed off on Office for Mac 2011, including final testing, Office 2010’s cousin for Macs is now heading to production and then to customers worldwide.

“We started two and a half years ago with some big goals to deliver major improvements customers have requested as well as new stuff we were dreaming up, and to release faster than we had before,” revealed Geoff Price, Product Unit Manager / MacBU.

“We also made a big commitment to invest heavily in “the basics” – fundamentals of software quality including design polish and finish, consistency and usability, and particularly performance and responsiveness, and to re-engineer our internal development processes around those goals.”

Price also underlined that the development process moved forward flawlessly, meaning that it did not hit any big hurdles, and the company was able to hit every milestone as initially planned, including the RTM.

For Office for Mac 2011 the next phase will end with General Availability. According to information from Microsoft, Office for Mac 2011 will be launched at the end of October 2010.

Leaked info from Amazon.com indicates that the GA deadline for the next iteration of Office for Mac is October 26th, 2010. Microsoft has yet to confirm this date officially.

Price did not hide his excitement over the finalization of Office for Mac 2011, naming the product Microsoft’s best release of Office for Mac.

“We’ve added Outlook for Mac, made big changes in team collaboration including everywhere access, full co-authoring and new connections to Microsoft services such as the Office Web Apps, SharePoint and SkyDrive, designed a new user experience, brought Visual Basic back better than ever, added new tools to easily craft professional docs (look forward to you seeing the new template gallery, Sparklines, in-document photo editing and more), and deep investments to keep bringing the most compatible productivity suite to you and your Mac,” Price said.