In a press event taking place in Las Vegas this week, Microsoft has unveiled that the public betas for Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 will arrive in November. The updated suites will bring a number of enhancements over their predecessors, including some new cloud-centric features, and will intersect with each other in areas such as social computing and document management.

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Microsoft would be better off reducing their Office prices, and widening the distribution. They are starting to hurt plenty from Open Office 3.1.1.. and the Google Office equivalent.. and it isn't going to get better... each time they hoaky it up, and continue to charge their high prices for a system that in most ways goes clear back to Office 97 and Office 2000, they lose several hundred thousand more customers world wide.

I can't wait to see some real changes to Outlook.

Just make the stupid tool bar Ribbon optional and I'll be happy.

I was using Microsoft office XP before and someone told me to upgrade to office 2007 and I updated and found it was really worth and lot of new features compare to old XP office. This time i am not going to waste any time. I will try the beta first and if its has some new feature and helpful for me then surely i am going to upgrade my office version this time because it saves lot of time and I guess for those time its worth to upgrade.

I was a Microsoft IT Professional conference and the presenter mentioned that a somewhat 'basic' version of Office 2010 will become standard on PCs, *finally* replacing Microsoft Works which will be discontinued.

I'm not sure how it will be crippled exactly, but I'm sure this is MS trying to relieve some of the pressure OO has given it.

He also mentioned the price is to come down substantially for the basic versions, possibly with a family pack. We'll see...

MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010 PUBLIC BETA - NOVEMBER 9th 2009

NOV 9
9-NOV
NOVEMBER 9
9TH DAY OF NOVEMBER

3 DAYS FROM NOW

Microsoft has no choice but to make it less costly... the competition demands it.
We are astonished by the numbers of our clients who have switched to Open Office 3.1.1.
Some from Works, some from Office 97, and Office 2000. It takes them about three days to love Open Office. The numbers of people who are moving away from the astonishingly expensive Office 2003 and 2007 to Open Office and Word Perfect is impressive. The pressures from the European Economic Community are significant.
Microsoft will have to dance to a new tune with this 2010 upgrade. If they price this right, they can recover. That is their only option as they have "improved" Office all that they can.

The public beta will be awailable starting from next week.

For more information see link below:

http://www.techreviewsource.com/blog/?p=288