Publications
Partners
Microsoft South Africa's Albie Bester said retail customers would have to wait a little longer as the product would only be available in shops from July.
Bester said the software has been designed for to make provision for users' need to be more mobile and able to work from anywhere. Office 2010 also makes provision for social networking.
"With the new version of Outlook, people can keep track of email conversations, stay up to date with their co-workers, friends and family, see Facebook updates and LinkedIn pictures for their e-mail contacts, and add a contact as a friend on social networking sites without ever leaving the application," he said.
"You can also communicate via social networks, and currently in Outlook 2010 this already works with LinkedIn and Microsoft's Sharepoint. We have announced plans to make it work with Facebook too," he added.
Bester said Office 2010 also allowed users to co-author documents and share these on the web. One can create a document and upload it to the internet where it becomes available for others to view and even modify.
"If you have a field worker out of the office, you can contact them and, for example, and show them a PowerPoint presentation over the internet to their phone or laptop," said Bester.
He said that this was an important part of Microsoft's strategy against other cloud computing, or web-based, software providers such as Google.
"Office 2010's Web Apps are lightweight web-browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. They will be available to consumers free of charge through Windows Live. Business users licensed for Microsoft Office 2010 can run Office Web Apps on-premise via a server running SharePoint," he added.
Bester explained that only owners of Microsoft Office would be able to create documents for Web Apps, however, but that once created they could be shared and worked on with anyone, for free.
Pricing has not been confirmed yet, but Office 2010 will be more affordable than the current version of the software, Bester said.
- Fin24.com
