The latest edition of Microsoft’s flagship Office Suite has entered the Technical Preview stage. Currently known as “Office 15” (being the 15th “wave” of productivity products”*) the current beta edition has been released to selected customers, of course under NDA.
PJ Hough, Corporate Vice President of Development, Office Division said:
“Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division”
and also:
“With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply”
This second point appears to indicate that there will no longer be a gap between new editions, and thus features, arriving on-premise and them being available to cloud users…a view which ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley seems to share:
If this is the case then it’s good news for partners & customers alike.
There will be a public beta in the summer so only 5 or so months to wait to see what’s going to be in there:
- Will there be a “Microsoft Accounting”?
- Will there be an Office Suite that includes Visio and/or Project?
- Will Word easily allow centralised building blocks for document creation?
Check out the Office blog post here:
*Well actually the 14th as they skipped 13 for reasons of superstition. So Office 2007 = Wave 12 and Office 2010 = Wave 14
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 