Los Angeles — For every modern businesses, even with the availability of open source office applications, Microsoft Office is the standard for productivity applications. During this week’s Professional Developers Conference PDC09 in the Los Angeles Convention Center, Microsoft unwrapped a free public beta of its forthcoming version of popular Office suite, Office 2010, In addition to and the “streaming” technology it will use to deliver some paid versions of Office 2010 next year.
So the arrival of Microsoft 2010 products that is due to ship next year — now released into beta — is big news. Microsoft Office 2010 is moving ahead by completing the transition that started with Office 2007, with an attractive upgrade for companies finally moving on from Windows XP and Office XP or 2003. And with the free beta, anyone can try it.
The 2010 versions of Visio, Project, and Office Web Apps for business customers are also live now at www.microsoft.com/2010. Windows mobile clients are also available in beta via the Windows Marketplace. After working a couple of weeks with the new release it seems that Microsoft has done a great job — of winning the last war.
This beta release will better equip programmers to develop add-ons for the new version, and for companies and interested parties to test it, before it goes on sale some time next year.
Microsoft senior vice president, Kurt DelBene, at length talked about the company’s plans for a (unified business platform) bringing together productivity experiences on multiple systems on-site or as online services. He added that the company already provides to 1 million paying consumers of its business productivity online service (BPOS), the Microsoft-hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint.
However, with a number of impressive individual features — from editing videos and broadcasting presentations in PowerPoint to enhanced charting in Excel and a slick Navigation Pane in Word — it is impossible to caste aside the feeling that Microsoft is building the world’s best battleship — at the dawn of the age of the aircraft carrier.
Another new attribute in Office 2010 is the Outlook Social Connector, which offers communications history, business collaboration, and social network feeds into Outlook, with backup for Windows Live and SharePoint Server.
Microsoft also rolled out the Outlook Social Connector SDK that would enable developers to create connectors to third-party social networks. LinkedIn will be the first social network to participate.
Our major feeling is that you can be much more effective if you have your professional network close at hand, and you can leverage your online identity in the work you do on a daily basis, Elliot Shmukler, director of product management for LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.
And, even as it makes Office 2010 by far the most sturdy office suite on the market — and begins to experiment with online features and sharing — is that really what matters any more? Can any of these features be compelling enough to keep companies spending on a high-end office suite for all their employees? Or do modern, forward-thinking companies just want something good enough, cheap enough, and compatible enough to do the jobs they need?
“The Outlook Social Connector will bring your LinkedIn Professional Network to where you work — right within your e-mail inbox.” DelBene said there is now much tighter integration between SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, so developers can publish their projects much easier.
Nevertheless, this beta issue includes 2010 versions of the Exchange email server, the hosted SharePoint collaboration platform, Visio, and Microsoft Project. Microsoft is also working on Silverlight 4 and Internet Explorer 9.
Sure, some people will always need the best possible productivity apps. Although there are not many nifty new features in Office 2010, Microsoft is making its email and personal organizer program, Outlook, work with social networking sites.
However, companies that are still glued with very old versions of Windows XP and Office could now decide that it is time to embrace the future, and upgrade to Office 2010 and Windows 7 together. But many others will be more than satisfied with something good enough, cheap enough, and compatible enough to do the jobs they need.
Take a virtual tour of the new features and enhancements in Office 2010 at the slide show here.