Office 2010 In Preview, Free Web Versions Coming

Microsoft's Office 2010 software is available as a technical preview, but those wanting to try out Office Web, the browser-based version of the Office suite, are going to have to wait a while longer.

Microsoft Office 2010, the next release of the vendor's ubiquitous desktop productivity application suite, has entered the technical preview stage of its development and is now available to tens of thousands of partners and customers for testing, Microsoft executives said Monday at the company's annual Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

But Microsoft Office Web applications, the browser-based version of the personal productivity applications Microsoft is developing to compete against "cloud computing" software from Google and other vendors, won't enter the technical preview stage until next month and remains on a later schedule than the packaged version of Office.

There had been speculation prior to WPC that Microsoft might unveil a more aggressive timetable for the Office Web applications. But Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, said Microsoft Office Web wouldn't enter a broad public beta phase until late this year and be generally available sometime in the second half of 2010.

Numoto, in a press conference following the morning keynotes at WPC, said Microsoft hasn't yet worked out just what role the channel will play in selling Office Web.

Microsoft intends to deliver Office Web to consumers through its Office Live service, which today includes both ad-funded and subscription-based software. Microsoft intends to eventually provide a Software Plus Services component to all its applications.

Numoto did say that all customers that buy Office 2010 volume licenses would have the right to run Office Web on their premises as well.

Microsoft first outlined its plans for Office Web, which includes lightweight versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, at its Professional Developers Conference last October. Office Web is a critical element of Microsoft's goal to offer a consistent Office experience across PCs, mobile devices and browsers.

Numoto said Microsoft even intends to support the Apple Safari browser and Firefox open-source browser, in addition to its own Internet Explorer.

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a keynote speech that while the technical preview for Office 2010 is by invitation only, he said every WPC attendee would be receiving an e-mailed invitation to test the new application suite. Microsoft Office 2010 is slated to be generally available in the first half of next year following a broader beta release later this year.

The technology preview release of Office 2010 joins SharePoint Server 2010, Vision 2010 and Project 2010 in the technology preview program. (Exchange 2010 is in a later public beta stage.) Microsoft also plans to reduce the number of editions of Office 2010 to five from the current version's eight editions, Numoto said.

As part of Elop's Monday keynote, Numoto demonstrated some of Office 10's new capabilities. The Outlook e-mail client, for example, offers a speech-to-text feature for previewing voice mail messages and an "ignore button" that blocks all e-mail replies in a string that a user isn't participating in. The new version of Excel lets users build small line charts called "smart lines" that fit into Excel cells. And PowerPoint 2010 provides some nifty slide-to-slide transition tricks.

But an effort by Elop to demonstrate new capabilities in Microsoft Office Communicator failed to work.

Elop, in his keynote, also touted the success of Microsoft's SharePoint Server, Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM applications, saying the latter is "absolutely winning deals against Salesforce.com and Oracle Siebel," Microsoft's chief competitors in the CRM market.

He also said more than 5,000 channel partners have enrolled to sell Microsoft Online Services, the vendor's "software plus services" offerings. "Our message is resonating with customers, and partners are beginning to make money by delivering custom solutions," Elop said.

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