Infographic by: Cloud Hypermarket

Steve Ballmer is presenting an event at 3PM BST in which he is expected to announce Office 365, things are already changing that suggest it will be launched in a few hours.

With Office Web Apps this idea makes even more sense.

If a personal dictionary was kept in the cloud via the Windows Live service then I would hope that Hotmail and Internet Explorer would also use the service for spelling and grammar correction. Sadly i fear it could be some time before we see anything like this, possibly as far away as the next version of Office.

Was combing through the Hotmail team’s Reddit thread. Seems like the biggest request is @office.com email addresses.

This led me and him to discus briefly what this idea could ultimately be. Paul pointed out that many people choose gmail.com for their email address because it seems more professional than hotmail.com, but obviously office.com is ever more professional than that. The problem could be with this idea that spam accounts would rapidly take over the email addresses so I think the email address would allocation would need to be curated in some way. If office.com was taken over with spam accounts then it would devalue the professionalism of the domain.

I suggested that Microsoft could continue to partner with LinkedIn (there is already a partnership between the Office team and Windows Live with LinkedIn) to bring some kind of control mechanisms to stop spam accounts. I also wondered about Microsoft creating its own professional network to control who could sign up for an @office.com email address. With Office being such a widely used program and as it is increasingly going to the cloud I can see a way for Microsoft to have a large network in a relatively short space of time.

The idea seems very plausible to me, Microsoft already offer different domain names for Hotmail email addresses and even Office Live used to let people sign up for an Office branded, custom email address. Microsoft, last year, took ownership of office.com so surely could easily offer @office.com as an email address.

I am sure Microsoft are always looking to increase they prominence online and perhaps offering @office.com email addresses would add to that. I guess quite a few people would register for an @office.com email address and then have it forward emails to a different webmail service, unless Microsoft could offer more for professionals in a web mail product. I don’t know what this could be but I certainly think it could appeal to many people.

I’d like the idea of having an @office.com email address and I am sure a lot of people would. If Microsoft could ensure the domain doesn’t get full of spammers then it could be one of the world’s most desirable email addresses, who wouldn’t want a professional focused email address. If there was some social network tacked on to this too Microsoft could finally have a networks that generates a lot of attention.

Would you want an @office.com email address? Can you think of any other ways this domain name/email address could be useful?

Over the summer there appears to have been a change in the way Microsoft has operated as of late. With Windows 7 Microsoft released a beta in January, followed some months later with a Release Candidate and then with the final release in October. This annoyed some people who wanted access to more regular builds of Windows 7. I think some teams at Microsoft whilst understanding the principle of “under promise, over deliver” of the Windows 7 team didn’t fully support the idea of so few updates. That seems to have been addressed this summer.

With Windows Phone 7 Microsoft have been more frequent with the updates they released for the developer tools, with a beta refresh and final version, and even the announcement of features the new operating system will have. This approach is slightly different to how Windows 7 was developed, but that might be due to the mobile space being far more competitive than the desktop OS market. Internet Explorer 9 also received regular updates through the developer preview, I hope the beta gets a refresh in about 7 weeks.

Some of the new features coming to Windows Live

However, with Windows Live there is a notable difference. Only 3 months ago did Microsoft release the Office Web Apps, update the online Windows Live services and Windows Live Essentials. Since then there has been a steady roll out of other online services, such as Hotmail and a beta refresh of Essentials. Then yesterday Microsoft made the previously mentioned announcements of more coming features to Windows Live. I can only hope that the continuous arrival of new features/fixes will continue now on for Windows Live. With the Office Web Apps I hope the same to be true with the arrival of some new features and the ability to embed documents across the web.

Before the summer we were lucky to have received any kind of tweak to the Windows Live services with the services not getting much attention for over a year. Yet Microsoft’s online competitors were hard at work often releasing updates and new features for their services. How Microsoft planned to compete with such regular updates I don’t know, I can only assume (and hope) that they now see the need to release incremental updates throughout the year. Whether any new features are ground breaking or not is beside the point, every time Microsoft have made updates to Windows Live over the summer they have received quite widespread attention from the media which will only encourage people to use the service more.

At this point I could go off on one about how Microsoft doesn’t get enough attention from the media but I believe its in part due to its slow, yearly or longer schedule for updating its products. With the web being more real-time now than it ever has Microsoft needs to release things on a far more regular basis to keep the media’s eyes on it.

I do think we have seen a change this summer in how Microsoft plans to release products going forward, a more incremental approach. I can perhaps understand why Windows Live took so long to receive any noteworthy improvement, Microsoft were hard at work implementing a system where by major social networks would link in seamlessly with Windows Live, probably no small feat. But now that the infrastructure has been implemented for Windows Live I hope that there wont be another long wait till we next see some new features on Windows Live.

In fact some of Microsoft’s most talked/hyped about products this year are Bing and Windows Phone 7 both of which have received regular announcements and new features.

One thing to note is that both Windows Live and Internet Explorer are under the control of Steven Sinofsky who devised the plan to keep Windows 7 updates so few. Its been a year since we got a new Internet Explorer and Windows Live version. Its my belief that Sinofsky knows that the approach of keeping things unknown for so long doesn’t work and that things need frequent updates which is why we have seen this change this summer. That isn’t to say I think Windows 8 will be getting several releases and lots of feature announcements when it is near ready for launch. I expect Windows will receive only a few releases but the programs that make Windows “shine” will get more frequent updates to keep Windows 7 fresh.

What do you think? Has Microsoft shifted the way it updates its products and services or do you think this summer has just been a one off?

1. Outlook  Social Connector. Most of us spend the majority of our working day with e-mail. But we also love the connection to family, friends and colleagues that social networking sites provide. What if you could merge your inbox with your social networks?  With Outlook Social Connector, you can get a people-centric view of e-mail and see the most recent status updates, wall posts, photos, attachments and appointments for the people you care about the most. Whether you like Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn or MySpace, the Outlook Social Connector gives you an aggregated view into your social networking life. 
2. Linked Notes in OneNote. OneNote is the digital notebook darling that many Office users just can’t live without. Some call it the ‘hidden gem’ within Office, because it changes the way people work by capturing text, video, audio and other content types in one single location. OneNote 2010 gets even better, with Linked note-taking – which lets you ‘dock’ OneNote to the side of your computer screen, take notes on a presentation, and map those notes in the presentation you’ve just seen. Whether you’re at school, remodelling a home or simply capturing notes from a client call, OneNote is a great application with unlimited potential to help you get things done.
3. Sparklines in Excel. Excel fans love the application not for the data organization, but for what the data tells them. Charts can be great for telling a story, but the newest feature in Excel – Sparklines – can make your numbers and figures even more exciting. Sparklines are charts that fit into a single cell to show a trend at-a-glance. Eighty-three percent of Office 2010 beta users agree Sparklines make it easier to visualize and gain insight from data.
4. Photo editing in Word. Did you know one in three people include pictures in their Word documents? Office 2010 now has built-in photo editing features, which make it easier than ever to import snapshots from the Web, edit them, and add visual effects in your document.
5. Video and broadcast capabilities in PowerPoint.  People are using multimedia more than ever to communicate ideas. PowerPoint 2010 gives video a first class seat, with the option to embed video directly in presentations and add stylistic effects.  PowerPoint also has a great new broadcast feature, where you can present a slideshow with dynamic transitions and animations to an audience of one or 100, clear across the other side of the world – even if your audience doesn’t have PowerPoint.
6. Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps help you work on your documents from virtually anywhere, using Windows Live SkyDrive. Get things done when you’re away from your “workspace” by creating documents in Office 2010, save them to SkyDrive, and view and edit with Web Apps anywhere you have Internet access. Web Apps make it easy to collaborate with friends, colleagues and family.
7. A Ribbon you can personalise. The improved Ribbon in Office 2010 not only appears in all of the apps, but lets you access your favourite commands quickly, and customize or create tabs to match your individual work style.

If you find all that above a little text heavy Microsoft have been kind enough to provide several videos demoing what can be done with the new Office 2010 suite of applications. Office UK has a YouTube Channel which currently only has the below video but if more are posted I will let you know.

Below is another video from Microsoft showing off the Web Apps

There are three versions of Office for sale in the UK:

You can find out all about the new Office 2010 applications, Web Apps, Office Mobile and how to trial and buy the software at office.com, the website has a very nice design.

Don’t forget this if you are on Twitter you can add the Office 2010 Twibbon to your picture.

First up is the Word Web App with a look at the Home tab or social controls to the right.

The Insert Tab.

The View Tab.

Now on to the Excel Web App which really doesn’t have much to shown off with its Insert tab being very similar to Word’s.

And finally is the PowerPoint Web App.

And if you add you a slide you can choose from this selection.

Whilst these Web Apps are fairly limited they offer enough functionality to quickly put together a document wherever you are in the world as long as you have an internet connection and being able to share and edit documents with one’s Facebook friends should be a quite an enticing prospect for many people. I have also tried to access the service on my HD 2 and was able to sign and see a list of my docs but was unable to edit them with both IE Mobile and Opera reporting an Error “Home(s1885)”.

Its good to finally have access to the Office Web Apps seeing as I have been waiting for these since about October last year and they are pretty as I expected the to be.

If you want to know more about this or see any other pictures just let me know in the comments.

Users can sign up to the service at Docs.com using the newly announced and released social integration tools from Facebook which allow users to register for a service even easier than before. Once signed in users will be able to discover and share documents with their Facebook friends and create or edit Office documents in the cloud using Office’s new Web Apps. The integration between Office and Facebook should, in theory, allow for some very user friendly document collaboration which looks set to be the future of how documents will be written.

I have tried to create a new document using the site but have so far only run into errors it is, however, possible to view the public documents from the home page. When viewing some of the provided documents I was able to see some of the social networking integration through the document’s wall on the right hand side, this could be quite a major feature.

I had hoped that the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive had been updated so we could use them but I guess we shall have to wait a bit longer, either when Windows Live is updated in the coming weeks or when Office 2010 is released to customers. It remains to be seen how this will work alongside the Office Web Apps integration in SkyDrive and Hotmail. Perhaps the partnership seen between Microsoft and Facebook will be carried over into the Windows Live services too with a single place the documents are saved but anyone with a Facebook account or Live ID could sign in and edit or create documents.

You can find out more about Docs.com, follow them on Twitter or “like” the application on Facebook.

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Microsoft will be offering two versions of each Office version at retail, a boxed edition with disc and license key and a Key Card which is used for downloaded or previously installed versions of Office and only has the license code on.

*Microsoft have yet to announce to UK pricing for Office Professional Academic

Info via IT PRO

Microsoft look to be aiming to increase the number of people who use their Windows Live set of services by incorporating Office Web Apps within Windows Live, this could prove to be a great move to get people to stop defecting to various competitors’ services.

For Office 2010 Microsoft will provide both a boxed edition and a Product Key Card that will require the software to be preinstalled or downloaded before it can be used. In the information below about the various versions and prices I have added to price in pounds which are probably not the values we will see when it comes to retail in the UK.

Office Home and Student
Boxed Version $149 ~ £93
Product Key Card $119 ~ £74

Office Home and Business
Boxed Version $279 ~ £174
Product Key Card $199 ~ £124

Office Professional
Boxed Version $499 ~ £311
Product Key Card $349 ~ £218

Office Professional Academic
Boxed Version $99 # £61
Product Key Card N/A

A more detailed document on what each version contains can be found here.