Next Wave of Office 2010 Supports S+S Strategy, Preview Coming in Q3

Microsoft today announced the key capabilities and expected timeline for the next wave of Microsoft Office and related products. Office 2010 is the product name for what had been called "Office 14".

Exchange 2010 will be the first product in this lineup, entering beta for customers to download today. Exchange 2010 will become available in the second half of 2009. Office 2010 — including Office Web applications, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 — will enter a technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010.

Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, made the announcement on PressPass at Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Will Redefine How People Work. He said, "With these new products we are giving people a familiar interface across PCs, mobile phones and browsers to make it even easier for them to create, communicate and collaborate from any location."

Developers benefit from investments we’re making on our platform that will reduce your development cycles and improve application interoperability. We are working on open APIs and deep support for industry standards. There's expanding developer tool support, all toward making developers’ lives significantly easier.

We are implementing new document format standards and have dedicated product engineering resources to deliver technical documentation for in-market and future Office-related products. Second, we have published implementation notes and a great deal of technical documentation through our Open Specification Promise so third parties can develop products that work with Microsoft Office-related products.