Today, as some of you may know, Office 2010 goes on sale around the world and with it comes news from Microsoft about the 7 best features that people should try out in the new version of Office.

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.

Today I got access to Microsoft’s and Facebook’s new social productivity site Docs.com which I blogged about yesterday and I thought I would share with you some images of the new striped down Office online suite.

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.

There are some more pictures today of the upcoming Hotmail version, but, get this, the images haven’t come from LiveSide or LiveSino, however I did find these images via LiveSide. These images actually come from a French website, www.pinnula.fr and show the whole Hotmail experience and some new things we hadn’t yet seen. I was going to post the images on this article but I have seen that Microsoft have asked for them to be removed from the original article, LiveSide still have the image though.

The first image shows how the conversation view appears in Hotmail preview pane with the latest email being expanded and the older, conversational, emails being shown collapse below it. It certainly seems like an elegant way to present a conversation of emails and prevents a lot of space being used up but allowing quick access to the older emails if necessary.

The second image shows some of new filters when searching for emails which include From, To, Subject, Folders, Keywords, Date ranges and With or Without attachments. These controls appear above the list of email and a preview pane for the selected email.

The final image shows how the Hotmail team have refined the Quick Add pane as it doesn’t shown by default, can be closed and is accessed alongside attachments, photos and emoticons. There is an emphasis on Bing in that anything you want to add to the email from the web is searched for via Bing which allows users to find Images, Clip art, Videos, Maps and places and Webpages. This again appears to be a much refined UI and it certainly something I am looking forward to using.

There was another image of the Word Web App, however this didn’t show if this was the stand alone app or if it was the app when accessed through Hotmail.

PicturePan2 from Livesino has some new images, in his latest post, showing the most recent build of the Word Web App and of how documents appear in Hotmail.

The interface of the header, as is expected, looks tidier and more informative; I guess the “on Hotmail” will change depending on what service the Office document is being viewed on with other options such as “on SkyDrive”.

The other options that can be seen from this image are the obvious File which I imagine will contain options to save the document locally, print it etc. Edit in Browser which will open a limited number of Office 2010 like controls and options, next is the zoom control, interesting to note this isn’t in the bottom right of the browser like on the client version. On the right side is a help, full screen and close button with the option to move through pages below.

What I am still interested to know is how ubiquitous Microsoft intends to make the Web Apps, if they want Office to be as big on the internet as it is on client PCs then I will assume it will be possible to embed “read-only” versions of the Web Apps on other websites.

I believe what we see above is an image of a received email which only says “LiveSino.net”, has no subject and a word document attachment. The Hotmail Active View appears to be a new feature that shows a true icon of the attached file rather than just a tiny paper clip.

We have seen the new features of the sidebar before with Quick Views and I assume that any email with a Office document will be shown in the Documents section and any email with photos attached be shown in Photos. However what is new is the Messenger section which is very interesting not only because it looks to emulate Gmail’s IM placement within an online email service but also because I thought the new Web Messenger would be available on all Windows Live services which would remove the need to have it feature in the sidebar. one reason I can see for this section is to effectively pin favourites within Hotmail so users don’t need to open Web Messenger but can instantly see who is online from within their inbox, likely to be the Live service they spend most of their time anyway. Hotmail certainly looks placed to be the centre piece of the Windows Live online suite.

From looking at these images I am increasingly more interested in Wave 4 will add to the online services, yes the Windows Live applications are good but the online services offer much more potential if a little less functionality. I also think the slight tweaks and refinements of the UI look great with its very tidy and clean interface.

LiveSino has posted two interesting, albeit not surprising, articles with regards Windows Live Wave 4 over the past few days the first of which is about no support for Windows XP. This comes from a screenshot of the information users need to agree too before downloading the upcoming beta of the suite in which only Windows 7 and Windows Vista are mentioned.

Its not surprising that Wave 4 wont be supporting XP and its something that most people will agree is the best thing for Microsoft to do even if a fairly large percentage of people can’t use the suite. As Picturepan2 points out in the LiveSino article this follows the same tactic Microsoft are using with Internet Explorer 9 which will also be Windows 7 or Vista only. Wave 4 also looks like it will support 7 languages.

Interestingly Microsoft aren’t following this approach with products they sell to customers but so far only their free software, I wonder if other free software from Microsoft will also drop support for XP such as the Zune software which is likely to be updated by the end of the year. For any Microsoft user it’s certainly not a time that I would want to still be on XP.

The other piece of news to come from LiveSino was that Wave 4 Hotmail will feature Office Web Apps integration so users can access Word, Excel and PowerPoint within Hotmail. As LiveSide have pointed out in the latest post on Inside Windows Live it talks about 95% of the storage capacity of Hotmail being taken up with Microsoft Office documents that are attached to emails, it therefore makes sense to allow quick access to these files within Hotmail.

It makes a lot of sense to me to integrate Office Web Apps into Hotmail as if it wasn’t for Live Mesh I would probably be emailing documents to myself on a regular basis and I know that my family often do just that. I also know that my family mostly only want to print or read a document that they have received in their inbox and probably don’t need the full power of the client version of Office for most documents in their inbox.

I know that Office Web Apps are Microsoft’s way to combat other online services such as Google Apps but I have wondered how they were going to get the average consumer to use the service as most wont find it tucked away in SkyDrive and this seems to be the obvious answer. Windows Live Mail is the most used email service in the world so if there was ever a way to get online users to notice a new Microsoft service it would be to incorporate that service into the users’ inboxes. If implemented well this could tempt users away from various email and online productivity services and could quickly allow Office to dominate in the cloud as well as on desktop computers.

As always I am looking forward to the next piece of news about Wave 4 and can’t wait for the beta of the suite.

Windows Live Wave 4 and Windows Mobile 7 are both suffering from a major lack of news and I have started to think that the lack of news about both products is linked.

I think the reason we have heard so little about Windows Live Wave 4 is because aspects of the suite are closely related to Windows Mobile 7 and as such Microsoft are reluctant to talk about it until their new mobile OS has been announced and demonstrated. Below I discuss some of the ideas I have had in which Windows Live Wave 4 could, hopefully, integrate with Windows Mobile 7.

Windows Live Devices?

We know Microsoft will be adding a new service, Devices, to the suite when they release wave 4 which suggests to me that many different gadgets, possibly including TVs, will be able to link up to Windows Live. It is also possible that aspects of the devices can be controlled, in some way, through the service. Currently Windows Live links up well with Digital Photo Frames, through FrameIt, and I expect the devices service to incorporate them. It is also understood that Live Mesh will become part of the Windows Live family so we see a place to add computers and mobiles to the service just like in Live Mesh. Finally I both believe and hope that the Microsoft My Phone service will utilise the Live Mesh technology, therefore become a Windows Live service; which should reduce the replication of data, such as contacts (currently Windows Live and My Phone don’t use the same list of contacts). To that end Microsoft won’t want to show off Windows Live Wave 4 yet as it would show the level of integration of phone storage of future Windows Phones and Windows Live.

If Microsoft is serious about the cloud then this is something they really need to do, by combining all their online services into a single place with the ability to centrally control linked devices and their storage it will make using Windows Phones and Windows Live much simpler for consumers.

Windows Live only services on mobiles?

If we now look at Windows 7 we saw Microsoft remove many of the default applications like Mail and Calendar so the company couldn’t be sued for bundling applications with the OS. Now the only way to access similar applications from Microsoft is to download the Windows Live suite. Microsoft could well follow a similar idea with Windows Mobile, but not for fear of being sued. It makes more sense to me to have a single calendar accessible on any Microsoft platform, whether that is Windows, Windows Mobile or on the cloud; the same can be said for contacts, tasks and several other aspects of Microsoft services. Instead of Microsoft providing downloadable applications to access these services I expect they will embed them within the OS with mobile calendar being the Windows Live Calendar. Some people could be concerned with the integration then between Windows Mobile and Office Outlook, however through the merging of Office and Windows Live in the cloud, through Web Apps, I can see a closer integration between Windows Live and Office Outlook.

It makes sense for Microsoft to only provide highly integrated services on their phones which link up with the cloud services of Windows Live; for example I would love to be able to sync my Windows Live Calendar with the calendar on my Windows Phone (why this has not yet been done still amazes me).

Windows Live going Social?

From job postings we know Microsoft are aiming to make Windows Mobile social by integrating several Social Networks deep within the OS, this could indeed mean an expansion for Windows Live. Microsoft My Phone already allows sharing photos on several Social Networking Sites from within the service. If then, as I predict, My Phone becomes part of Windows Live Microsoft will be making their online suite of services even more social. It makes sense that Microsoft would use Windows Live as the platform to share content, for a start they already have a good Photo service which I expect to soon be joined by a Video service. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we see the launch of a URL shortening service from Microsoft, probably along the lines of WinLi.ve. Messenger is one of the most used Instant Messaging services and if Microsoft were able to leverage those social interactions through more aspects of Windows Live they could stand to gain quite a lot. Again if Microsoft were to use Windows Live as the means of consumers sharing content to Social Networks then they wouldn’t want to show parts of Windows Live before Windows Mobile.

For me it would seem Microsoft is gearing Windows Live up to be a platform for sharing content, they already have a lot of websites partnered up to allow people to keep informed of “What Is New” with their contacts; it would therefore be logical for Microsoft to provide a means of reversing the exchange of information and allowing posting of information to those services via Windows Live.

I am really looking forward to information on both products from Microsoft and would hope my ideas would only scratch the surface of what Microsoft has really been up too. I guess we shan’t be hearing much with regards either of the products for over a month until the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona on 15^th February; seems a long way off yet.

Today Microsoft released information about the pricing and various versions of Office 2010 that consumers will be able to purchase later in the year. Most interesting for me is the new Office Professional Academic, that I will qualify for, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access and is cheaper than any other version.

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.

In this post I want to look at some of the trends we can expect to see over the next year from Microsoft and the wider tech world.

2010: The Year Of Touch

We all know that Microsoft added Windows Touch to Windows 7 to bring touch computing mainstream and it will be this year that we start to see the benefits of Microsoft having added support for touch interface. Increasingly there will be more all-in-one-desktops, notebooks, netbooks and monitors that are touch enabled and because of this more developers will look to add innovative ways to use touch which will increase sales and complete the cycle.

Then, of course, there is the ever present rumour of the Apple tablet, or iSlate, which will bring touch interface to the very front of the consumers’ attention. It seems that some companies are planning to combat the rumour of the iSlate before anything is confirmed with rumours of a Google/HTC partnership for a Chrome OS tablet. It remains to be seen if there will be anything new to touch control added by Apple or if it will just be a large iPhone.

Talking of phones there will be an increasing number of touch only smart phones coming from the likes of HTC and Sony. There will probably be some interesting apps appearing for Android and I hope for Windows Mobile. Although no one seems interested in writing apps for Windows Mobile 6.X maybe 7 will inspire developers to create some, much needed, useful apps for the platform.

Microsoft may have another trick up its sleeve with the Courier concept that I hope will come in to fruition sometime this year and then there is the plan to bring the Microsoft Surface to our homes, not something I expect to see soon but maybe some aspects of the interface will work its way into new platforms.

However by the end of the year we may have already gone beyond touch and have entered the realm of touch-less control when Microsoft release their Project Natal which, to begin with, will only be for Xbox but I would hope an expansion of the technologies involved.

2010: The Year Of The Cloud

I know one of the most popular buzzwords for 2009 was the Cloud but I think 2010 will be the year it really comes to the masses. Microsoft will be launching its Windows Azure platform properly in February followed by Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps which will see Microsoft embrace the Cloud like it has never done before. I am also expecting Windows Live Wave 4 to contain much more Cloud based content with new services, improved storage and ways to access programs online. It is also possible that Windows Mobile 7 will be more cloud orientated, we know there plans to be a high level of social networking incorporated with the mobile OS.

Apple will be looking to take more services to the Cloud or face being left behind as Google forces all tech companies to focus more on the internet. With regards to Google we will see the first browser OS which really can’t be any more Cloud focussed and I expect many more Cloud services and greater integration of those services with its Mobile OS.

2010: The Year Of The Ribbon

Windows 7 uses it in its standard applications, we know that Office 2010 will be featuring it in all the applications and from the leaked screenshots it appears that Windows Live Wave 4 will use the Ribbon interface.

It seems to me that Microsoft are finally beginning to agree to use a more coherent design approach to their applications where the Ribbon interface is used in content creation applications such as Paint, Word and Movie Marker. Those three suits of applications will be the most used from Microsoft and it will be great to have the Ribbon mainstream but I would hope that work on the next versions of Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

Another type of application Microsoft is content browsers such as the Zune Software which seems to be the inspiration for the unreleased version of Windows Live Messenger which could also be described as a content browser. Microsoft seem very keen on the linear interface for their entertainment devices, Zune HD and Xbox, and I would expect that any new entertainment devices would follow a similar approach.

Lets hope Microsoft can continue the good design and interfaces of 2009 in their new products of 2010 and that other software developers will use the Ribbon interface and create new and exciting interfaces.

I have many questions and hopes about what we will see this year and I am looking forward to playing with the new applications and devices that will come out over the year, maybe some of which we will see as early as next week at CES.

With the beta release of Office 2010 last week I thought I should explore how the suite works with the cloud, obviously there is the obvious example of the Web Apps (until next year we wont really know how good the full suite is) but there are a few other things to note.

Saving (uploading) to the cloud

Within each of the Office 2010 applications there is now the option to save the file directly to the cloud, using the Windows Live SkyDrive service, so users can edit the document online, using the Web Apps, or on another machine by downloading the file. The images below shows how to save your document to the cloud.

As you can see the application lets you choose which folder to save the document too, if its your first time of saving to SkyDrive you will need to sign in in the application first.

After hitting the Save As button the follow dialogue pops up and after clicking Save the file is save to the cloud. Once the file is saved to the cloud by just clicking the save button will update the uploaded file.

The window looks a bit sparse to me, I expect there will be a populated navigation bar on the left when Office 2010 is released.

The document now in the cloud straight from Word 2010.

Editing (downloading) from the cloud

You may think that to edit this document, that I haven’t saved on my PC, I would have to download the document from SkyDrive, thankfully though this isn’t the case.

By accessing the Word Jump List you can view all of your recent documents, including those that haven’t been saved on your PC.

When trying to open a document that has only been saved in the cloud Word will ask you for your username and password, obviously it will only ask for it once if you check the box.

Word will then start downloading your document and then open it just like it was on your PC.

I was expecting the normal Save icon to appear in the Quick Access Toolbar but it seems to only be this new resyncing icon, there is no one else with access to this document. I guess that this is because this is a cloud document.

One thing I have noticed that doesn’t seem to be working correctly is that when clicking Open File Location Word comes back saying it can’t. Not sure if this is a bug or because the Office suite, Web Apps and SkyDrive aren’t yet final. Now I am looking forward to being able to edit my Word documents in the cloud with the release of the Web Apps, when ever that will be.

I am not sure how well used this feature will be as I reckon that Live Mesh will become part of Windows Live Sync and SkyDrive and so people wont need to manually upload their documents to the cloud.

With Office Web Apps being released to testers this week it got me thinking about Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy as we can now see the Office service in the cloud to accompany the software on PCs.

So what other combinations are there from Microsoft that fulfil the Software + Services strategy?

Current Software + Services

Windows Live – A great example of the strategy

Live Mesh

Part implementation of strategy

Coming Soon Software and/or Services

Looking at what Microsoft currently offer and are planning to offer there are a few areas that need to be addressed before this strategy is truly realised.

Windows Live

The majority of this suite works brilliantly as both software and services but there are a few offerings that need to be added too:

• Web Messenger needs a lot of work done to it to make it a real counter part to the software, currently it looks awful and has such limited functionality it doesn’t feel like a final release of the service but more of a beta version
• I am not sure if the link between Photo Gallery and Photos needs to be changed but seeing how Office applications are now accessible though the internet maybe Microsoft should consider adding editing features to the web service so users can edit their photos online before publishing them to the internet
• I can’t see a version of Movie Maker coming to the browser soon however I think there should be a place to upload and view the movies online
• An online version of Writer would be brilliant and seeing how it is such an internet oriented application it makes sense to have a version accessible through a browser for times when people aren’t at their own PC and can’t install Writer
• A way to access SkyDrive from a PC using explorer really should be added as this would increase the usefulness of the service hugely as users could save their work from their PC directly to the cloud and even use it for things such as backups

Live Mesh

There isn’t much that needs doing to this offering as its works very well however a few more controls of what and when something is syncing would be a great addition. There is talk that this will be moving the Windows Live suite and I would hope it becomes part of the SkyDrive.

Zune + Zune.net

I was surprised to see the addition to the Zune.net website to allow users to listen to music through the browser but if this is the way the team are taking it then maybe there will be the option, in the future, to stream music from your own collection to listen wherever you are.

Windows Mobile + My Phone

I think the My Phone features and functions will be great when its final release launches on October 6th but I do think it need to be combined with Windows Live to create one place to go for all online storage and contact information, it would also keep both offerings more up to date for users to have only the one place for both.

Windows + Windows Azure

I am not entirely sure what Windows Azure will be like when it is finally released but I know I am looking forward to using it in whatever form it may take to bring the PC to the cloud and as I have yet to use it I can’t suggest improvements.

Office + Office Web Apps

The Office Web Apps are still very basic but their potential is huge as I know there have been times when I have needed to alter something but haven’t been at a PC with Office on and with it coming to Mobiles too it will really be a great service.

The Future

The XBox has yet to have any service but that is perfectly understandable seeing as it is so different from anything else, but who knows maybe in the future Microsoft will want to compete with OnLive and bring out a streaming service for games on TVs and PCs.

I know there are plenty of other applications from Microsoft that has no service counterpart at all, such as Visual Studio, but maybe over the next few years we will be seeing more software have a version on the internet as more and more offerings go to the cloud and lets hope Microsoft improve what they have already done to achieve their goal of Software + Services.