Today Office Teams reached an exciting engineering milestone- the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.
Official launch will be on May 12th with a virtual event.
Launch event site http://www.the2010event.com
The Open XML SDK allows you to create, consume, and manipulate Open XML files (MS Office files like Word, PowerPoint & Excel) without needing to automate Office client applications. With the introduction of Office Services as part of SharePoint 2010, the server side automation will also be easy and powerful to perform.
Microsoft has officially announced that May 12th, 2010, is the launch date for SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010.
RTM is expected to happen during April 2010.
Launch event : May 12th at 11am You can register for the event @ http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx.
Important SharePoint 2010 Links :
SharePoint 2010 : What’s new in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint Foundation 2010 : Software Platform Requirements
Here are few important links which will help solving some of the confusing around custom xml and i4i patent judgment for all those who are big fan of OpenXML specification and specially ‘Custom XML’ concept.
What’s affected and what’s not ?
Microsoft’s Official Statement
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-22statement.mspx
| Office Professional Plus | Office Professional | Office Standard | Office Home and Business | Office Home and Student | Office Professional Academic | Office Starter | |
| Collaboration | |||||||
| Word | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |
| Excel | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |
| PowerPoint | * | * | * | * | * | * | |
| OneNote | * | * | * | * | * | * | |
| Outlook | * | * | * | * | * | ||
| Publisher | * | * | * | * | |||
| Access | * | * | * | ||||
| SharePoint Workspace | * | ||||||
| InfoPath | * | ||||||
| Communicator | * |
* Includes
- Operating system Supported: Windows XP SP3 (32-bit), Windows Vista SP1 (32-bit or 64-bit),
Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit), Windows Server 2003 R2 with SP2 (32-bit or 64-bit),
or Windows Server 2008 with SP1 (32-bit or 64-bit). Terminal Server and Windows on
Windows (WOW) are also supported.
- With Office 2010, Office is now available in a 64-bit version
- Office Mobile works with Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and SharePoint Workspace.
Microsoft recently announced the August 2009 CTP of Open XML SDK 2.0. The improvements have been made in mainly following areas :
You can read more about it here. Download it from here.
Recently Open XML code snippets have also been released. This package of code snippets provides over fifty reusable code samples, in both C# and VB.NET, which accomplish many common tasks involving Excel, PowerPoint, or Word documents.
MOSS 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information.
Business Collaboration platform for enterprise and web
Mostly on-premise
Deployed on-premise or as hosted service
Portal : Share content based on user’s profile
Collaboration : Allows Teams to work together
Content : Create and manage documents, records, and Web content
Search : Quickly and easily find people, expertise, and content in business applications
Business Intelligence : Make informed business decisions
Business Process & Forms: Design business forms that are accessible directly in a Web browser and integrate them with databases or other business applications.
Sites : Share information seamlessly with employees, partners & customers
Communities : Empower people to work together
Content : Manage content lifecycle from creation to disposition
Search : Find Information and People anywhere
Insights : Make informed business decisions
Composites : Rapidly create dynamic business solutions
Supports 32 and 64 bit platform
Supports only 64 bit platform for SharePoint and SQL Server
Office Clients provided some out-of-box integration
Smart client – SharePoint workspace with all features
No client APIs for integration with LOB apps
Client APIs will be available
Single browser support
Multi browser support – IE, Firefox, Safari.
Excel Services
Excel & Visio Services
While MOSS 2007 provided great open platform in technology space for enterprises, SharePoint 2010 will take the Enterprise 2.0 strategy to web/internet and thus to customers and partners.
All the communication and collaboration products from Microsoft like Exchange, Office Communications Server and SharePoint MOSS provide excellent clients to harness the server capabilities in most effective manner. Like Exchange comes with Outlook, OCS comes with communicator and SharePoint comes with Outlook & Groove integration & SharePoint workspace from SharePoint 2010.
Apart from providing standalone clients they also ship enough programming interfaces so that these server capabilities can also be integrated within Line of Business applications. This helps customers to extract maximum value out of their server investments. Exchange server comes with Web services interface, OCS comes with UCCAPI – unified communications client APIs and now SharePoint 2010 will come with client APIs.
Here are some of the programming interfaces provided by Exchange Server 2010:
Yes, I am one of the lucky ones who got invitation to try Technical Preview of Office 2010.
Office 2010 team has continued with a unique way of collecting feedback. Once you install preview , two icons get added to you task bar.
Whenever while using Office 2010, you want to give feedback good or bad just press one of the them and it takes the screen shot of current Office screen. It also pops up a feedback screen where additional details can be added.
I believe quite easy way for users to provide feedback instead of going to connect site or sending emails.
The invitation only Technical Preview of Office 2010 is out and I am using it :-). 
Here are few of the new stuff i could figure out in last 2 days of usage.
- All new animated colorful splash screen which even shows what’s going on in background.
- Notification in Taskbar showing Outlook is still closing. Very useful for people working with multiple profiles.
- Backstage View – reduce the pop-ups and provide all options to work on content created at one place. So it replaces File menu.
- Conversation View : This is one of the most important feature introduced. In your inbox now you can see mails grouped by conversation which includes mails from other folders like sent folder to give a unified view. It also indicates the relationship between received and sent mails.
Ribbon : Ribbon gets introduced in Outlook also now which was available earlier with word, excel & PowerPoint 2007.
Quick Steps : Aimed at increasing the productivity of frequently done tasks, it also to create shortcuts for such tasks.
Ignore : Ability to ignore a particular conversation which means any mail with the same subject will directly go to deleted items folder.
Meeting enhancements : Ability to see the preview of calendar in the meeting request received. Real time availability of people while setting up the meeting. Both of them very useful.
There are many more new features left to be explored. I am using Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2007. There must be few more new stuff once I start connecting to Exchange 2010.
Check out my latest article published on devx.com.
It’s about how to us Open XML sdk to generate Microsoft Office documents without VSTO or automation. Article is accompanied by code.
Microsoft has just released the following Knowledge Base articles (KB972041, KB972042) to address the incorrect calculations of license expiration dates for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 and Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition. The current expiration dates were calculated based on build time, causing the OCS 2007 R2 and OC 2007 R2 Evaluation Edition to expire after June 13, 2009. By applying this fix, the expiration date will be correctly based on installation date of the server.
Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Office Communications 2007 R2
Server Pack 2 for both Office Client and Server Products is getting released on 29th April, 2009.
Here are few important enhancements:
Get more details here :
2010 is going to see the next launch wave of Microsoft Products. ‘Office 14’ has been named as Office 2010 based on its launch schedule. Exchange 2010 is expected to launch in late 2009 while rest of the Office products in 2010. Remember there was no ‘Office 13’. After ‘Office 12’ its directly ‘Office 14’.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 are also expected to be launch in 2010. So get ready…..
Open XML sdk is a huge productivity boost for development teams working on programming Office Documents.
April 2009 CTP of version 2 has been released while final release is expected to come with ‘Office 14’ release.
Version 1 allowed working on Open XML files at package level.
Version 2 earlier CTP allowed working @ parts level.
This CTP introduces Schema Level Validation functions.
Expected to be released between February and April of 2009. It will contain both client and server updates.
Some of the highlights of SP2 will be:
Will be providing more updates as they become available.
I am starting an article series mainly for solution architects and others responsible for designing solution on Sharepoint platform.
It will start from the basics and will gradually move to designing Office Business Applications (OBAs) on Microsoft Office System.
Some of them will be high level while others quite hands-on.
The first three articles are published :
Let me know the article ideas on which you would like to read the articles.
Check out my latest article :
Generate Office 2007 documents using OpenXML SDK
