For those of you with a TechNet subscription and an itching desire to download the Office 2010 Suite of products, they are now here!! I’m sure every other blogger is writing this same post so I won’t make it long. The RSS feed for the released products is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscription-downloads.rss if you want direct links to the downloads, here they are:
Office Search Server Express 2010 Beta (x64)
Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x86)
FAST Search Server SharePoint 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Project Server 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x86)
Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x86)
Office SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x86 and x64)
Office SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (x64)
Office SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Business Contact Manager 2010 Beta (x64)
Office Web Applications 2010 Beta (x64)
That is everything I currently see on TechNet. They are all English versions and please, no one comment and tell me I have the wrong names. I realize the names above don’t all match up to the new names that Microsoft announced when it comes to SharePoint. I just copied the names directly from the TechNet site.
Ben "Office 14", Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Office, Office 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Beta Downloads, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server
Yesterday the Groove team announced on their blog the change to Groove. They said, “The name makeover is in concert with the direction the product is going. SharePoint Workspace will provide easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols) in an effort to provide a seamless online/offline experience.” It will also now be bundled with the Office Professional 2010 package.
I’ve used Groove some but ran into some limitations as I was running all 64 bit machines. The post doesn’t mention anything specific about running on 64 bit, nor have I heard any other news about it, hopefully this is another thing that will be updated, the same functionality on 32 bit and 64 bit. Stay tuned for more news about Office 2010 as it emerges.
Ben "Office 14", Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Groove, Office, Office 2010, SharePoint WorkSpace
Lots of news on the Microsoft Office front today so I decided to add a blog post instead of just twittering about it.
The first items comes from a recent posting by www.microsoft-watch.com. Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be release in two weeks, on April 28. Two of the largest changes are the PDF/XPS printer will now be included automatically in SP2 rather than the separate add-on download/install that it is now. The second improvement is the added support of ODF (Open Document Format) documents. The list of improvements and bug fixes is long, but those are the two major ones in my opinion.
The second one is that Office “14” is going to be Office 2010. There was a posting earlier about it, that also receive some doubt about it’s validity. However, this posting by Mary-Jo Foley seems to confirm that the initial posting was accurate, even if the screen shot wasn’t valid.
I’m not going to go on way or the other on the validity of the screen shot, but needless to say, there were plenty of very strong indicators that the next version of Office will indeed by Office 2010.
Ben "Office 14", SharePoint "Office 14", Office 2007, Office 2010, Service Packs, SharePoint "14", SharePoint 2010, SP2
Sadly, it’s true, Ballmer announced the other day that the next version of Office won’t be released until 2010. Despite all the rumor going around about the “14″ becoming a “2009″ it appears it will become 2010. You can read more about the announcement here.
Ben "Office 14", SharePoint Microsoft, MOSS, SharePoint "14", WSS
Details are starting to surface about SharePoint “14”. One of the details that has been solidified in the last couple of days is the integration of Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST Search into SharePoint “14”. Microsoft made the first step towards the integration this past June when they released FAST Search web parts for SharePoint 2007.
It will be exiting to see details of SharePoint “14” continue to emerge and the growth and expansion of the SharePoint platform and search in particular in this case.
admin "Office 14", Search, SharePoint "Office 14", FAST Search, MOSS, Search, SharePoint, SharePoint "14"
Again, EVERYONE is blogging about this, so I had to make my heading a little different. Once again, in case you missed it, SharePoint Conference 2009 is in Vega this year. It will be October 19 – 22. It is for IT Professionals, IT Decision Makers, Architects and Developers with a plethora of classes for everyone.
According the Microsoft’s own site, “SharePoint Conference 2009 will be the conference to learn about SharePoint “14”."”
Register for the conference and get the early bird price!
Ben "Office 14", Conferences, Development, SharePoint
Yes, I really am catching up on my blog and writing about stuff I should have written earlier 
At the SharePoint Technology Conference there were actually two keynotes. One by Tom Rizzo, Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and one by Errin O’Connor, my boss, founder of EPC Group and author of “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out”.
Both were good keynotes, although I thought Errin’s was more beneficial, but I also may be partial. Tom spoke to the SharePoint platform and where it is headed in terms of Azure and cloud computing, although not nearly up to everyone’s expectations on Office “14”. That was probably the largest disappointment of the conference. About all we got was that Office “14” will have Excel Services type services for all the other Office Suite products and allow some editing of files directly in SharePoint.
Errin spoke to Calculating SharePoint’s ROI and its Impact on your business. He illustrated and gave an example of it using one of our large clients and the process we used for calculating the ROI for them. It spoke a lot more to the issues a lot of people are dealing with and need to know in order to get SharePoint up and running in their business.
Good jobs to both keynotes!! It was a great time and fun to listen to you both.
Ben "Office 14", Conferences, SharePoint
I’m kind of behind in my whole Happy New Years and Merry Christmas post so here it is…Merry Christmas and a Happy New Years!! My holiday’s have been wonderful. I spent some time up in MI with my family. From there some time out to CO to spend Christmas will by girlfriends extended family and then back home to FL. For New Years my girlfriend and I had some friends over that were in town for a couple of weeks. We had a good time just hanging out and playing the Wii . To ring in the New Years I attended the annual New Years Day party at my girlfriend’s parent’s house and I’m off to play TPC at Sawgrass on Friday. So far 2009 has been going well.
I’m also looking forward to another year of SharePoint fun, hopefully getting to start with the beta of the next version of SharePoint as well is give Windows 7 a try (the beta comes out on Jan. 13). I’ll also be presenting for at least on SharePoint conference this year, SharePoint TechCon 2009 in San Francisco. I’ll have a post in the next couple of days with more details on the conference.
Ben "Office 14", Misc, SharePoint
I was just sent this article by my boss about upcoming versions of MS Office. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7772869.stm We all knew it was coming sooner or later, MS Office hosted in the cloud with all your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc files being edited in your browser instead of in a local application. It will be exciting to learn more about this solution in the coming year.
I’m still a little skeptical as I’m not sure a lot of business would like that much information being pushed over the internet. Hopefully MS will still sell a localized server version so business could run “Office Online” on their own internal corporate cloud to improve the security of documents if MS goes to all browser based applications.
Let me know your thoughts on the matter.
Ben "Office 14"
Unfortunately, not really being a developer, I didn’t attend PDC 2008. This also means I wasn’t able to hear first hand about all of the great upcoming new Microsoft software releases. I have however, been able to follow the blogs and news postings of those that are in attendance and learn about the upcoming releases from them. One of the most exciting for me, being the SharePoint guy I am, is finally some more information about SharePoint and Office 14. Here is a great post by Joel about Office 14 – Office 14. In addition, Microsoft has been talking a lot about it’s cloud computing Azure. Finally, a really big deal has also been made about Windows 7. Here is a short list of some of the coolest features of Windows 7. You can always Google (don’t tell Microsoft I said that) PDC 2008 as well and find lots more information about what Microsoft is releasing and working on.
Ben "Office 14", SharePoint