RSSOffice 2010, SharePoint public betas for November, VS 2010 Beta 2 Wednesday
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 19, 2009, 2:56 PM
During an industry event whose original purpose was to concentrate on SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's collaborative server product, CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that his company is making ready an official "public beta" of Office 2010, the applications suite for Windows.
The most likely timeframe for such a release would be during PDC 2009, Microsoft's annual developers' conference now scheduled for the third week of November in Los Angeles.
No further details on Office 2010 were revealed, but this much we do know: It is Microsoft's plan now to build O'10 in such a way that OEMs can install a full product on PCs for sale, which will come up in a limited "Office Starter" functionality mode until customers purchase the product online or through retail outlets. This reduced functionality mode will not be the same as Office Web Apps, which will be available to all users for free, even if they're not licensed Office users and even if they're not using Windows.
What we will probably learn at PDC next month is how fully-featured Office Web Apps will be compared to Office Starter. Given the company's recent developments, it's seeming more likely that OWA will be geared toward users who already have access to Office documents, even though they may not have Office itself. This way, editing functions may be limited to making changes to content that has already been created -- especially in the case of Excel, whose spreadsheets in the early public beta enabled users to view charts but not create them, and enabled them to use cells that already had conditional formatting but not create new ones with the same feature.
The current Office 2010 Technical Preview is a relatively stable product; extensive Betanews tests involving the Word, Excel, and Outlook components have revealed numerous cosmetic problems, but surprisingly few crashes. However, there are relatively few new features in the Technical Preview; what Outlook 2010 appears to support that Outlook 2007 did not, appears to be focused on new functionality that will be provided by SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint's functionality this round appears to be extensively reworked, especially around the idea of letting businesses create rich, socially active networks for their employees. These networks will be better integrated with Office applications, by making SharePoint sites into destinations directly accessible through the apps themselves, rather than through Internet Explorer.
New services available through SharePoint servers will effectively make them into hosts for Office Web Apps. Demonstrations at today's conference in Las Vegas included the presentation of an Excel spreadsheet through a SharePoint site, whose contents were viewable directly through the Web browser. The SharePoint server, in this case, is the one hosting the Excel display functionality, eliminating the need for many employees to have direct access to Office or Excel.
The two buttons on the demonstration site's toolbar, "Edit" and "Open in Excel," suggest two levels of functionality for editing purposes. The "Edit" functionality appears to be a way to launch the complete Excel Web App through the SharePoint site, which may offer some (perhaps not all) online counterparts for Excel editing capabilities. Microsoft is about nothing if it isn't about leveraging; and in this case, Silverlight is being used as the trestle for connecting platforms. The rich media support for new SharePoint 2010 sites will be provided by Silverlight -- that will apparently be the component that enables higher-definition video than is currently capable, as well as richer controls. The ability for developers to build SharePoint sites is being built into Visual Studio 2010; and developers' first taste of this ability is the primary focus of VS 2010 Beta 2. That build went live on MSDN this afternoon, along with .NET Framework 4 Beta 2. Both betas will become generally available Wednesday afternoon.
No surprise Microsoft is leveraging their monopoly to force their insecure, proprietary, patent encumbered, Silverturd down peoples throats.
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|Hey fatty have you ever used SharePoint or is this just more banter from an Apple fanboy? I happen to use SharePoint on a daily basis and have designed many sites around it.
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|fatty, enlighten us. What do you use? What do you enjoy? What's the best we could have?
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|Sharepoint actually DOES force you to use Microsoft technologies that further one into entrenching with Microsoft, so while somewhat misguided, I think he has a point.
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|Um, Sharepoint of 8 years ago did, the last couple of versions work without any Office software whatsoever. Truly...
PS To follow your logic, who forces you to use Sharepoint, that then forces you to use Office?
See even if Sharepoint did force people to use Office (and it doesn't as everything is Web Based), then don't use Sharepoint - there are other technologies, most free, and some others even from Microsoft.
Score: -1
|I'm a person who wants to use Windows Server, A/D, IIS, SQL Server, Sharepoint Server. Just as everyone else has choices. I have all of their competitors to choose from. i choose Microsoft and their platform. It works really well now and i'm looking forward to the newer versions releasing soon.
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|Yes, they have Share Point here and it is complete crap. Good luck trying to find any documents on it. Why do i need Word to edit a document? Why does Sharepoint and all the other tools cost so much money? I bought, with my own money, Atlassian Confluence and have been putting documentation up on a wiki. Oh, i downloaded MySQL for free for the backend. When other people in my department found out about it, they wanted to use the Wiki. Now we are looking at increasing the users on it and expanding it. My boss could not believe how much cheaper it is.
I can use _any_ platform, Linux, Windows, Mac, etc... and read/update content with not hidden costs in buying a bloated super expensive office suite, Microsoft server OS'es, Microsoft SQL Server, etc... So freaking expensive, especially for how many servers you need to support a tiny user base. No wonder the London Stock Exchange dumped the crap .net stuff.
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|@atab0y - if you like vendor lock-in and have a ton of money to piss away from here to eternity, have at it. I am trying to save my boss a ton of money and increase usability of our group
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|Hi, my name is fatty and I'm just insane enough to prefer Flash to Silverlight
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|@fatty... b****ing about Vendor lock-in while you have a iPhone?
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|How am i locked into my iPhone? please elaborate? All my contacts and mail are managed via Google, which i can access from anywhere on any device with a standards based web browser. My music is in mp3 and acc which are industry standards playable on all platforms.
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|"Hi, my name is fatty and I'm just insane enough to prefer Flash to Silverlight"
I don't like either. but to me, there is no point in moving from Flash to Silverturd; i want less proprietary stuff, especially less proprietary stuff from a convicted monopolist like Microsoft.
Score: -3
|@fatty and your whole rift.
You obviously have lost touch with reality.
Linux, MySql and the like have their places and it's not in most major enterprise environments as the main source of software.
According to your flawed logic, everyone should go the open source route. Well have you thought about what that does in the big scheme of things...I'll lay money you haven't even given it a any time in your pathetic brain.
Let's say everyone uses open source...then what happens is who is making any money since open source is free? No one, that's who and then when they see this coming you can bet that open source won't be open source any more and then guess what??? You're back to vendor lock-in and paying mass amounts of money for software and support.
So you see, that you're logic is completely flawed and while you try to look all knowing, you really don't know much at all.
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|Red Hat seems to be doing very well. BtW - your logic is flawed, open source has nothing to do with costing money or not costing money; i see you regurgitate the Microsoft propaganda quite well. See, your logic is completely flawed as you do not understand of that which you speak.
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|Funny to see that coming from someone that likes Apple lock-in. :P
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|@fatty
As usual, you are blind. My logic is not flawed, it is pure fact.
Open source is open source. It's not about which product is better than the other as some open source programs are better but in this case, Open Office can't hold a candle to Microsoft Office...plain and simple.
You need to get off your pedestal because the people swinging the axes at the bottom of it will make you fall soon enough.
Being the admin of a 15k user environment, out of about 80 servers, 3 are open source. You'll find that in 99% of the cases out there in the Enterprise environment. Deal with it.
and btw..........I do own an iPhone
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