LOS ANGELES — If you want to try out
Microsoft Office 2010, the beta is available for anyone to download, the
company announced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.
It also said Office Web Apps,
Microsoft’s online competitor to Google’s Google Docs, will be available for
anyone who downloads the 2010 beta.
Office Mobile 2010 is also available
in beta, which you can get by going to the Marketplace for Mobile if you have a
Windows phone.
An interesting new feature for
Office is a Social Connector to Outlook that can pull in status updates from
social networks. LinkedIn was the partner announced Wednesday at PDC. It will
connect early next year. No word on Facebook or Twitter.
Also, for IT administrators, betas
are available for Sharepoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010. Office Web
Apps on-premise is also available to beta test if a company wants to install it
on its own servers.
The final version is supposed to be
available in, not surprisingly, 2010.
“People may have historically
thought of Office as a desktop or PC thing,” said Takeshi Numoto,
corporate vice president of marketing for Office. “With 2010, we are
really focused on giving that productivity experience across the PC and
browser.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
