Microsoft Office 2010 feature preview – Now FREE and ONLINE!
Microsoft Office 2010
By now, most of us have heard bits and pieces about what Microsoft is planning to do with their next iteration of Office, 2010, including extending the ribbon interface to Outlook and any other program that were without and the collaboration enhancements allowing multiple users to not only edit a document together, but even display PowerPoint presentations in a remote web browse.
However, some interesting news came out earlier about a completely new method of access and use of (most of) the software suite – nearly full featured online versions accessible on any of the major web browsers. This isn’t a particularly revolutionary move, which is not uncommon when it comes to Microsoft, with Google Docs being so well developed for the past few years, but there is the potential for Microsoft to make a major splash with this release… and did I mention it will be free?
Microsoft has launched an Office 2010 introduction site with videos demonstrating some of the key features, changes and improvements that will be coming with Office 2010, including a video specifically dedicated to the upcoming web based features.
With the Office online services, Microsoft is putting collaboration first. Documents will be both accessible and sharable through their SharePoint service which will allow groups to share access to a single document, each users’ changed being clearly identified in the sidebar. The current plan for the Office online lineup is to provide Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note with nearly all of the functionality that you would have access to on a normal Office install. Of course, Microsoft is sure to make the point that you “would never want to lose the full feature set” of a purchased install, but the online versions maintain the ribbon interface and seem powerful enough.
In the video detailing the web interfaces, Microsoft provided a demo of Excel 2010’s web interface. The dev was able to sort and filter her content as well as use the full formula functionality of the full product. It seems to me that only the most extreme users would be able to find a major functionality of the online version of these application that was left out.
This announcement would seem to be a direct challenge to the already popular Google Docs which has been providing an almost identical service for the past few year at the same cost. Anyone who has used Google Docs, though, knows that while it is fully capable of getting the job done, it’s not always the easiest or most efficient. Google’s recent announcement of their Chrome Operating System (Google Chrome OS) relied heavily on their idea of creating an operating system that was able to integrate web applications as a replacement for actually installing programs in order to be light-weight and netbook friendly.
By announcing a free version of Office that is able to run on any web browser somewhat distills my excitement for Chrome OS due to the fact that Windows 7 is already very “light-weight and netbook friendly” when configured properly, and the ability to run Office without needing to
a) install software to fill the generally small hard driveor tax the underpowered processor
or
b) forcing users to spend a few hundred dollars on basic productivity software (that may cost more than the netbook itself)
As it stands, we still don’t know the full story and there isn’t any version publicly available for the general public to use, so there will still be plenty more to come about what we can expect from Microsoft’s online adventures. Personally, I can’t wait to see what Microsoft comes up with and how much impact it will actually make. I’m always in support of heading toward “the cloud!”
