Yesterday, Microsoft announced Office 365 – a rebranded and consolidated version of its existing Office Live Small Business, BPOS and Live@edu online services.  It seems ironic that this should come in the same week that the company announced the loss of Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, the man whose Internet Services Disruption memo has, arguably, led to Microsoft’s reinvention as a software plus services company, embracing online services as a key part of its portfolio (even if the majority of its revenues still come from traditional models) but it is an acknowledgement that Microsoft is serious about cloud services.

Encompassing SharePoint, Exchange, Lync (formerly Office Communications Server) and Office (Web Apps and Professional client), Office 365 is certainly an interesting proposition for small businesses.  I use Google Apps (free) right now, but at $6 a month, Office 365 is almost free, and if that price really does includes a full copy of Office Professional (for as long as I’m a subscriber), it’s a steal.

Microsoft says that Office 365 is suitable for an independent professional, for a small business (up to 25 users) or for a larger enterprise. How can one product suit all needs?  The answer, is that it can’t.

Instead, what Microsoft has done is to package the Office 365 service for two distinct markets:

• Office 365 for Small businesses and professionals is aimed at 1-25 users, with Exchange (including a 25GB mailbox), ActiveSync, SharePoint (single site collection), Office Web Apps, a public website, Online Access databases, Lync client, online meetings, desktop sharing, multiparty instant messaging and PC-PC calling, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and self-help/community support.  All for $6, per user, per month.
• Office 365 for Enterprises is aimed at larger organisations, and those where they need ActiveDirectory Sync, e-mail archiving (e.g. for legal compliance), Blackberry connectivity (Blackberry Enterprise Server), more than 50 users in the organisation, and 24×7 phone support.
  • Furthermore, the Enterprise plan is divided according to worker roles, so that Microsoft can provide different services for different groups of users (at different price points between $2 and $27 per user per month, list price – although volume discounts will be available).

So, what were the other highlights in yesterday’s announcement?

• Microsoft is claiming that Office 2010 is the “fastest selling version of Office in history” [really?]
• Microsoft’s existing online services serve millions of customers in 40 markets worldwide.
• 167m messages are sent per day from Microsoft’s cloud services [I’d be interested to see the source/scope for this… Microsoft often includes everything right back to Hotmail in its interpretation of cloud services].
• Office 2010 was designed for on-premise and cloud capabilities.
• Office 365 is currently in a limited beta and will “ship” worldwide next year.
• Office 365 always runs the latest version of Microsoft’s Office software (SharePoint, Exchange, Lyn, Office Web Apps and Office Professional Plus).
• Microsoft sess software as 15% of overall IT spend.  By moving into online services they increase market share by picking up some of the infrastructure revenue; but claim cost savings of 10-50% for customers.
• Partner opportunity is to expand reach and grow revenue by helping customers to use the software and not just deploying it.  Hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions could be an opportunity.

Office 365 is an interesting development.  As a customer, I think it’s very interesting and a more than credible alternative to Google Apps.  As a partner, I’m less convinced but that’s not a conversation for the public Internet.  Either way, it shows that Microsoft is serious about competing and the move to subscription-based services is starting to get moving.

After much speculation (including some from myself), Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 has been released to manufacturing. I’ve been using the community technology preview, beta, and release candidate versions of the product since last summer and I have to say that there are quite a few features that have become productivity enhancements for me – and that it’s pretty unusual for a mature product to include this sort of innovation.

I’m not going to run through all the features in this post (I did talk about a few of them in an earlier post and I hope to expand on that when I get time) but I thought I’d call out a few pointers that might be useful for organisations looking at deploying the new Office products, based on the presentation by Reed Shaffner, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Office, at the UK TechDays Office 2010 event on 13 April 2010.

First up, is the fact that, aside from a slightly larger memory footprint, the specifications to run Office 2010 are unchanged from 2007.  That means that the same Windows Vista-class PCs that can run Windows 7, will also cope well with Office 2010 – although there are other reasons to look at updating PCs as the age of the device is a factor in overall TCO, at least according to Gartner.

All volume licensing editions of Office 2010 require activation – that means that enterprises need to be looking at deploying a key management service (KMS) in order to avoid abuse of multiple activation keys (MAKs).

Office 2010 has a new 64-bit product edition – although, unless the ability to access large amounts of memory is important, Microsoft recommends running 32-bit (even on 64-bit versions of Windows) due to incompatibilities with plugins.  And, talking of incompatibilities, Office 2010 is designed for tighter integration with App-V such that, if App-V v4.6 is used to deploy Office applications, many of the previous application virtualisation issues are fixed (e.g. the hooks to open files in SharePoint, send to the OneNote print driver, send to mail, etc.) by uses proxies to activate them when Office applications are running virtualised.

Office 2010 has a number of security features – recognising that, as the operating system is better protected, malware attacks have moved up the stack to the application layers, concentrating on weaknesses in file formats and document parsing.  For example, if the Office file validation checks fail, a warning is displayed and the user has to go into Office back stage and explicitly select to ignore warnings and edit anyway.  More commonly, documents that have originated elsewhere may open in Protected View and give the user the option to enable editing.  In addition, applications such as PowerPoint remove any content that they do not understand (i.e. which is potentially harmful) from the document structure.

When preparing a document for sharing, in addition to the option to inspect a document for hidden properties, there is a new accessibility checker that can ensure a document complies with various accessibility standards – including the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) v2.0.  This accessibility checker educates the user on how and why to fix a document – and is enforceable via group policy.

Document compatibility is another concern and, whilst third party tools are available from partners such as Converter Technology, there are Microsoft tools that can help too:

• The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit v5.0 includes  an Office 2010 Readiness Assessment which looks at hardware compatibility and provides recommendations and assessments in order to plan an Office 2010 migration, for example identifying add-ins and interfaces, tagging applications that are known to be incompatible, and mitigating VBA/macro code.
• The Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM) is a collection of tools to prepare an environment for migration to Microsoft Office 2010. OMPM can be used to scan for file format issues, identify potential macro issues, and to migrate legacy office files to the Office OpenXML format.
• The Office Environment Assessment Tool (OEAT) is another scanner that can be run against multiple systems and provide rolled-up reports on the overall environment.
• The Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI) compares existing (legacy) code against the Microsoft Office 2010 object model to identify possible code issues, looking for issues in macros and inserting comments accordingly.
• Other resources that might be useful for organisations looking at Office 2010 deployment include:
  • Deployment Options for Microsoft Office 2010.
  • Application compatibility assessment and remediation guide for Office 2010.
  • Group Policy settings reference for Microsoft Office 2010.

Finally, just as with Office 2007, Microsoft plans to produce an Office Productivity Hub – in both standalone HTML and SharePoint 2010 format – to provide self-help content for end users (effectively a help portal for office) along with an interactive command reference guide (for help with getting to know the fluid/ribbon user interface) and an enterprise learning framework (to helps organisations develop a training and communication plan for employees during deployment of Office).  All of these are expected to become available over the next few weeks.

Microsoft released the Office 2010 Technical Preview yesterday and as it’s been highlighted as a preview, pre-beta, and not ready for primetime, it sounded like just the sort of software I should run on my everyday notebook PC!

Actually, that PC will almost certainly be rebuilt over the next few weeks to run Windows 7 RTM code, so now is a perfect time to install a 32-bit version of Office 2010 (there is no inplace upgrade from 32-bit Office 2007 to 64-bit Office 2010) and then when I rebuild the operating system I can install the 64-bit version of Office (I do not have any 32-bit plugins to cause me any issues there).

Downloading the Technical Preview was remarkably fast. I don’t know how much bandwidth Microsoft has put in front of Connect (anyone would think they had a major product launch coming up…) and admittedly it was the morning here in the UK (so the United States was still asleep) but I pulled down the images for Office 2010 Professional, Visio and SharePoint Designer. Other options available were SharePoint Workspace (the new name for Groove), InfoPath, Business Contact Manager for Outlook (along with its database tool), the Microsoft Outlook Connector and some language packs.

Running the Office installer, it looks very similar to Office 2007. One difference I spotted was that it required a product key (Office 2007 has a grace period based on the number of times the application is launched) and also there was the option for online product activation (again, not something I remember in previous Office releases, although the technical preview is based on retail media and I tend to use volume license copies so that may account for some of the differences).

Setup gave me the option to upgrade or to customise (I chose upgrade) and it merrily worked its way through the process with no obvious issues.
When it had completed, I was amused to see a popup about a Send a Smile feedback mechanism for communication with Microsoft about product experiences! I completed the setup wizard and rebooted the system, waiting with trepidation to see if my Office productivity applications would still allow me to work!

After logging in again, Office Communicator 2007 R2 autoran as normal and didn’t seem at all perturbed by the presence of newer Office components on the System. I fired up Outlook, it found my profile and worked through my e-mails as it prepared itself for first use. It then told me that Outlook was not currently my default program for e-mail calendar and contacts (presumably the registry was still pointing to the “old” 2007 executable that would have been removed as part of the upgrade) and gave me the option to make it so, and then I got my first taste of Outlook with a ribbon. Maybe it’s because I’m used to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007’s ribbons but it seemed to work logically. I processed a few e-mails and had no difficulty finding any of the options – and now I have a whole load of new productivity tools available to me (Outlook is potentially where I will find the greatest benefit, with QuickSteps and MailTips – as well as improved integration with OCS).

Word was next on my list… it looks just like Word 2007, but with a lighter appearance. Similarly for Excel and PowerPoint.

I’m not going to review the new features in Office 2010 here – I mentioned a few of them yesterday, it’s still a technical preview, and others will do a better job of reviewing it than me – but my first impressions are extremely positive. Office 2010 (particularly Outlook) feels faster and more responsive then 2007 did on the same system – whether that’s because it’s running on Windows 7, or whether it really has been tuned to run on lesser hardware is yet to be seen. Most importantly, my upgrade appears to have run smoothly, with no negative impact on my existing applications. Furthermore, in just a few minutes of use, I’d found some more great features that weren’t in Microsoft’s demonstrations – like Outlook highlighting split conversations (where two people responds to different messages in the same thread), or applicaions opening an attachment in Protected View and requiring me to explicitly enable edits. I’m sure there I’ll find many more gems like this over the next few weeks!

Ed Bott has reviewed the Office 2010 debut, including screenshots, details of the 5 editions in which it will be sold (Office Home and Student; Office Home and Business; Office Standard; Office Professional; and Office Professional Plus) and highlighting some very important caveats:

• This is not a public release.
• This release is a milestone but it’s far from feature complete.
• It’s not ready for prime time yet.
• The most interesting pieces aren’t out yet.

If you want to see the Office 2010 webapps (and I do), then you’ll need to wait a bit longer. Right, now I’m off to upgrade the rest of my Office applications (Visio and SharePoint Designer)…

Soon after Office 2010 was pre-announced at TechEd copies began to circulate on the ‘net. I’m not sure of the source of these but like the unofficial Windows 7 builds, they are probably best avoided.

There is a way to add yourself to the list to be considered for the Office 2010 technical preview when it is released in July though – there are no guarantees that you will be successful (it is a limited programme), but worth a try anyway. For those whose applications are successful, the products available for preview will be Office Professional 2010 and Office Visio 2010.

There’s not a huge amount of public information about Office 2010 yet, but we do know it will feature web applications, more extensive use of the ribbon user interface and will be available in both 32- and 64-bit modes. In addition, Groove gets a new name (SharePoint Workspace) and both SharePoint Workspace and OneNote will be in the Professional Plus SKU (which replaces Enterprise Edition). It looks like Visio and Project will still be sold as separate products.