I am very excited to share some great news with you. Earlier today we reached the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) milestone for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010!
RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release and our engineering team has poured their heart and soul into reaching this milestone. It is also an appropriate time to re-emphasize our sincere gratitude to the more than 5,000 organizations and partners who have worked with us on rapid deployment and testing of the products. Since the start of our public beta in November 2009, we’ve had more than 7.5 million people download the beta version – that’s more than 3 times the number of 2007 beta downloads! The feedback that we’ve received from all these programs has shaped the set of products we’re excited about, and that I’m sure will delight our customers.
Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.
Earlier this year we announced that we will officially launch Office 2010 to our business customers on May 12 with Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division, delivering a keynote as part of our virtual launch. Our virtual launch will allow people from around the globe to participate in our launch by going to http://www.the2010event.com. The virtual launch site will showcase product demos, customer and partner testimonials, and interviews with product managers and executives, and we hope this will give you another great way to explore, learn, and get excited about the 2010 releases.
Office 2010 will first become available in retail stores in June in the US, and customers can pre-order these retail versions of Office 2010 at http://store.microsoft.com/OfficePreorder today to receive Office when it becomes available.
On behalf of the Office team, I want to thank all of the customers and partners who have helped us reach this milestone. We look forward to continue learning from you and all the great things you will do with our products!
-- Takeshi Numoto
Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office
On the heels of our recent announcement that Office 2010 has released to manufacturing, many of the individual Office team blogs have posted similar announcements and deep summaries about their specific aspects of Office. Over the next few weeks we’ll link to many of these posts to give you an overview of all the great features Office 2010 has to offer. Or, if you can’t wait, you can use the links to the right to go directly to the team blogs.
First up is the PowerPoint team blog. They recently posted discussing the Top 10 benefits of PowerPoint 2010.
If you’re interested in more detail and screenshots, click through and see the detailed, illustrated list.
Enjoy!
With the launch of Office 2010, we are producing another wave of great help and training content. The new Office 2010 website (office2010.microsoft.com) delivers articles and demos that will quickly get you up to speed on the new features and functionality in Office.
There are two key ways to get access to this great help and training content from right within Office 2010. When working on your document (or spreadsheet, etc.), you can click the icon in the upper right hand corner of the application and go straight to in-app help browser. In addition, the Backstage view in Office 2010 has a section called help that gives you direct links to Microsoft Office Help and Getting Started information. The Getting Started link launches a web site full of excellent tools for users new to Office 2010. Some of the tools include command maps and interactive guides that show you where commands from Office 2003 are in Office 2010. Additional articles highlight the some of the new features in Office 2010 and provide tips on basic tasks.
For those of you who are still using Office 2007 and are looking for direct access to help and training, we also created an add-in that surfaces great resources and tools for you by adding a Help Tab to the Ribbon. The Microsoft Office 2007 Help Tab, which can be added to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, is tailored to users who are transitioning from Office 2003 to Office 2007.
The key features of this add-in are direct help database search from the Ribbon, Command finders to help you find commands from Office 2003 in the new Office 2007 UI and Online Tips which provides links to key articles and training that users found useful as they began to take advantage of Office’s broad variety of features. To learn more and download this add-in click here.
We hope these new resources for Office 2010 and Office 2007 help you get your work done faster and more easily. Let us know what you’d like to see in the future by using the comments below.
Last year we released Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 Beta, a suite of productivity applications for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. First and foremost, we want to thank everyone who has tried Office Mobile 2010 Beta and has given us valuable feedback.
The Beta expired on April 5, 2010. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. While the expiration date was mentioned in the product terms of use, we realize that you may have questions and we decided to answer them in today’s blog post.
If you installed Office Mobile 2010 Beta on your Windows Mobile 6.5 device, then this does impact you. As of April 5th, you are unable to launch the Office Mobile applications on your phone.
No, uninstalling Office Mobile 2010 Beta will not delete or alter any of the documents you have on your phone or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Office Mobile 2010 will be available for download through Windows Marketplace for Mobile at the same time as the Office 2010 suite in June 2010.
Do you have any more questions? Feel free to post a comment below or e-mail us.
Hello, my name is Kate Kelly; I am a Program Manager in the Office Global Experience Platform (GXP). In Office 2010, GXP focused on features designed for customers working in multiple languages, such as updating Language Preferences and adding translation tools to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote.
In Office 2010, one of our new features is an on-the-fly translation feature called Mini Translator . The Mini Translator allows you to translate single words or many paragraphs simply by hovering over the text that you want to translate. Mini Translator also includes the ability to Speak that text using Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine.
We have also enabled Speak for the Quick Access Toolbar and the Customize Ribbon Options. Customers who rely on TTS can add the Speak button to either of these and have quick access to Speak at any time (via the mouse or a keyboard shortcut).
One of the key pieces of feedback we received from customers was that you wanted more languages for Speak. We teamed up with the Microsoft Speech Technologies team to make this possible. With the RTM version of Office 2010, expected sometime in June, you will be able to download and use the Speech Platform and additional TTS engines from the Microsoft Download Center.
Speak will recognize the language of the text you select and checks if you have that Text-to-Speech language, either from a built-in Windows TTS engine, 3rd party engine, or a TTS engine from the Download Center.
For example, I have the English TTS engine installed, but not the Chinese TTS engine. When I hover over the Chinese text, the Speak button is not available; however when I hover over the English text the Speak button is enabled.
In addition to the improved user experience for international users, we believe that the Speak feature is a great investment that reinforces Office’s commitment to accessibility as well. You can learn more about other accessibility investments we made in Office 2010 in Larry’s great post.
And you can learn more about how to use Speak in the “Using the Speak feature with Multilingual TTS” article on Office.com.
Note about duplicate TTS languages: if you have a 3rd party TTS engine already installed on your computer, Speak will use that TTS engine rather than the Microsoft TTS engines you can install from the Download Center. For example, if I have a German TTS engine from a 3rd party product and I also install the German Microsoft TTS engine from the Download Center, the 3rd party TTS engine will always be used. If I uninstall the 3rd party TTS engine, Speak will start using the TTS engine from the Download Center. This way, by downloading new TTS engines from the Download Center you will always be able to ensure maximum readability, while not sacrificing interoperability with built-in or 3rd party engines.
We hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are – use the comments to let us know what you think and how you might use this feature for your work.
Kate Kelly, Program Manager, Microsoft Office
As we gear up to launch the next version of Office, I want to share a bit of what's in store. Each new version of Microsoft Office is developed through a fundamental approach that includes extensive research, planning, and most importantly, lots of listening to our customers to discover what they really need from their software to be more productive. The goal of this approach (what some might call stoic ☺) is to deliver a product that reflects how essential our products are in the professional and personal lives of over half a billion customers around the world, and one that is designed to help these many customers be more productive in real ways.
Our customers are helping us do this with their feedback. We reached more than 6 million downloads of Office 2010 in the 17 weeks since the start of beta last November. This has been our most successful beta in the history of Office. Over 80% of beta users have encouraged others to download the beta, and 9 out of 10 beta users feel that the Office 2010 beta is an improvement over their current productivity suite
Of course, we are aware of others taking a different approach. Some believe that businesses and consumers will settle for software and services that deliver rudimentary capabilities, or what some call 'just the basics'; however, our customers tell us that they want to accomplish something great (not just mediocre). They really care about the quality of their work. They want to collaborate and pull from the collective wisdom of their teams to deliver their work the way it is meant to be seen (without compromising fidelity). With Microsoft Office 2010, we want to help them do just that, and I believe the new capabilities deliver on what our customers are asking for.
Here are some additional elements of the upcoming release that I am excited about:
We're making it easier than ever for people to try and buy Office 2010 when they purchase a new PC. We're partnering with the top PC makers around the world to pre-load the Office 2010 "image" on new PCs, so you can just buy a Product Key Card to activate the version of Office you want to use. Thanks to these partnerships, I expect to see 80% of consumer and small business PCs shipping with an image of Office 2010 pre-loaded. The pre-loaded Office 2010 image (that can be activated to become any of the retail versions of Office 2010) also comes with Office Starter, which is reduced functionality versions of Word and Excel that include advertising. Office Starter will help people get acquainted with Office 2010, and we are excited that it will help us reach new customers. Once customers are ready to step up to a full version, upgrading is just a few clicks away.
Most people are on the go today and need to access their information from wherever they are. We created Office Web Apps with this in mind. People will be able to view, access, share and work with their Office documents from virtually anywhere using Office Web Apps. The web-based apps will be available to consumers via Windows Live and business customers can integrate them as part of their IT infrastructure. Nearly 500M users will have access to the Office Web Apps when Office 2010 is available. We are really excited about how this makes Office more useful in more places within people's lives, but also about how this helps us reach customers we may have not reached before. Customers who may have never experienced Office will be able to see why over 500 million people worldwide already use Office. I see this as a great way to expand our customer base, further connect with students, small businesses and consumers across the globe.
With Office 2010, we will help people harness the phenomena of social networking and help customers manage their lives by bringing their professional, social and personal networks together through Outlook. Staying connected can help consumers become more productive. Recently we announced the Outlook Social Connectors for Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. These partnerships will deliver capabilities that empower people to integrate their social networks into Outlook 2010, making it simple to update contacts, change status and bring their various networks together in a familiar and consolidated user experience. It is one of my favorite new capabilities in Office!
These are just a few examples of the ways we plan to make Office 2010 impactful and accessible for our customers. The cloud represents an expansion of opportunity for us, and opens up huge new opportunities for us to provide our solutions to more people. We are evolving our business to seize these opportunities, and are really excited about reaching more customers to help them in deeper and broader ways. You should check it out for yourself at www.office.com/beta.
Corporate Vice President, Office