Project & Office 365; by the numbers, ready for Metro

How well is Microsoft's Office 365 doing? There aren't many official figures but some interesting statistics showed up at the Project conference last week. According to Office 2007 corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft is seeing "a trial customer roughly every 25 seconds come onto the service". By my calculations, that's 3,456 trial customers a day or 103,680 a month. He also noted that 70% of the seats on Office 365 are small and midsize businesses (for whom getting rid of an Exchange server and the work of managing it is a no-brainer, frankly; we moved our small business to Office 365 last summer). Over the next five years, he said, Microsoft expects half of the Exchange seats Microsoft sells to be Exchange Online (so Office 365 and Exchange hosted by Microsoft partners).

For comparison, Project itself is selling a copy every 20 seconds (which should be 4,320 copies a day and 129,600 copies a month). Those are all boxed copies, but yes, Project will be part of Office 365 (and presumably as more than just the Project Web App that's available with SharePoint).

"While we've got nothing to announce today specifically in terms of the road map, I guess I would just say of course we're going to have Project in the cloud," Koenigsbauer said. "There is absolutely no question about it. And it's one of those workloads that I think is really well suited to being in the cloud, because it's one where Office 2010 Standard can do the work to have it effectively deployed for customers, and set up, and managed, which enables it to really move beyond just the IT organization, and be accessible to sort of business units across the organization all up."

Unlike the Dynamics demo at the Microsoft Convergence conference, the Windows 8 demo in the Project keynote didn't include a Metro style app; instead it showed users pinning links to Project views on SharePoint sites, checking PowerPoint presentations and using the Lync 2010 app for instant messaging. Here's hoping that's because the Office 15 technical preview is still under wraps and we see something in the summer beta that offers the same kind of views of activity charts and available resources as the Dynamics Metro demo, which is the most impressive vision of Metro for business apps we've seen yet.

Office 2010 is the best software in the world

The only other option was to worm in via Outlook Web Access, but because there’s no Linux version of Internet Explorer, you were forced to use the horribly rudimentary stripped-down version, which was spitefully designed to punish people who had the barefaced cheek to run Chrome or Firefox. The old version of Outlook Web Access made Lotus Notes look cutting edge: even basic tasks such as creating a meeting were akin to a colonoscopy, and you could literally make a cup of tea in the time it took to perform a basic keyword search of your inbox.

Recently, however, the aforementioned Dennis IT manager upgraded us to Office 2010 Professional. This means we now have access to the sparkly new Outlook Web App, which is like trading in a Datsun Cherry for a BMW 5 Series with alloy wheels.

It’s not as sophisticated as Outlook 2010, but it’s not far short. Performance is excellent: there’s no more waiting 15 seconds for an email to open, search returns results a second or two after you hit Enter, and you can open attachments without having to right-click and save the file to a folder. You know, all the things other webmail clients (such as Gmail and even Microsoft’s Hotmail) have been doing since the dawn of the 21st century. It looks good too: the interface is attractive and uncluttered, although strangely doesn’t use the Ribbon interface that is now found in all of Microsoft’s other Office apps, both client and web.


As Jon Honeyball noted in a recent column on Office 2007, the Outlook Web App might well be the only email client many people need. The only problem I had is that it doesn’t automatically fetch new email using Chrome in Ubuntu in the same way that it does when accessed via the same browser in Windows. Why, I simply do not know.


While I was experimenting, I decided to give the other Office Web Apps another go, having not used them in anger for the best part of a year. I had a 3,000 word feature to edit, so cut and paste it into the Word Web App and set about the task. The last time I tried the online version of Word, performance was a little sluggish when dealing with hefty documents. There was a slight lag between typing and seeing the words (some of them spelt correctly) appearing on screen, which was just irritating enough to put me off. Now, performance appears much smoother, even if the feature set is rudimentary compared to rivals such as Zoho. The Word Web App’s spellcheck, for example, is an unusable mess.

Office 2007 easy to use for the following reasons

Microsoft also added another version of Office 2007 previously reported range of officesoftware suite. After the start of the meaning of the "Deluxe Edition" The company publishes a range of received requests for home users, so that makes the Office Ultimate.

Office 2007 ultimate idea is that the single is available in almost all the sameprocedures and techniques as the most expensive business package to the user, theCNET news service. According to Microsoft, customers make such a package, so one is available. However, the price is quite high, $ 679.



Trough collaboration and InfoPath forms
Office 2010 Standard  includes all perusversioidenkin software such as Word and Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. According to the publishers and Access database software, electronic OneNote to take notes.


The final package also includes INFOPATH, its original purpose in the enterprisenetwork business users. It can be used to do in the form of XML in various fields ofinformation can be collected directly from the company's back-end systems. The finalpackage also includes Microsoft's new Groove collaboration software.

Office 2010 price difference in various countries

Now that Microsoft has released its new Office 2007 suite to manufacturing, online and brick-and-mortar stores are ramping up pre-sales efforts for the productivity suite, which is expected to ship in June.
Amazon and Best Buy are now promoting Office 2010 pre-sales, as is Microsoft's own online store.


What's clear from Amazon's site is that customers who opt for a fully boxed version of the software over a download will pay a heavy price for the extra cardboard.
The boxed version of Office 2010 Professional is a whopping $499, while the download is $349.

There's also significant price discrepancies between boxed and download delivery for other versions as well. For the Home & Student version, it's $149 vs $119. For Home & Business, it's $279 vs $199.

Microsoft is offering free upgrades to a comparable version of Office 2010 to customers who purchase Office 2007 between now and September 30.
Office Home & Student 2007 buyers get a free upgrade to Office Home & Student 2010. Office Standard 2007 customers receive a free upgrade to Office Home & Business 2010, and buyers of the 2007 versions of Office Small Business, Professional, or Ultimate can upgrade to Office Professional 2010.
Along with the desktop versions of the software, Office 2010 includes an online version Microsoft is calling Office Web.

Access to Office Web, which includes versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote optimized for the cloud, is available to Microsoft's subscription customers at no additional charge to the client version. Consumers will be able to access Office Web entirely for free through Microsoft's Windows Live portal.

Different functions in Office 2010 and office2007

Microsoft has pulled down a blog post that detailed a promotional offer for a free upgrade to Office 2010 if punters buy Office 2007 download in a limited time frame.


According to Arstechnica, the post was by Charles Van Heusen on his 'In the Know' blog at Microsoft's US Partner Community website.
The offer is to run for customers who buy Office 2007 from an authorised vendor between March 5 and September 30, 2010.



Users must have activated their copy of Office 2010 Professional by September 30 and can request the free upgrade to Office 2010 by October 31 at the latest, if they send Microsoft the Office 2007 activation key and purchase receipt. Once Microsoft has that information, it will offer punters a free download or send the DVD's out in the post for a minimal shipping fee.

Arstechnica caught the information on its RSS feed and while the original link is now down, the information was cached in Google so it has some screenshots of the offer.



We're assuming that Microsoft will be offering a similar service in the UK but here's a word of wisdom for you. If you do get a free upgrade offer, stick to the download and install. A lot of end users got their fingers burned on 'free' Windows 7 upgrades with some shipping fees costing upwards of £25.00.

Microsoft Office 2010 has been all over the world

Office 2010 is a worthy upgrade of Microsoft office 2007 suite juggernaut, but for many users "worthy" doesn't mean "necessary." If you're a casual user or are on a tight budget, you can manage without this upgrade, but power users with cash to spend will find the upgrade worth the cost. What we hoped for but didn't get in this version of the suite: a thorough reworking of Word and Excel to make them modern and user-friendly in all their features, not just in some. That would make for must-have Office upgrade. Even without those improvements, however, and Office remains the best and most powerful application suite on the planet.

Microsoft's latest version of its wildly successful productivity suite is a potent combination of innovation and ease of use, but it still has a few too many annoying faults (albeit far fewer than any other large-scale application suite). Still, I have to report that in the weeks I've been using Office 2010 full-time, I've been taken aback by a few instances when Word and Outlook shut themselves down automatically, displayed an error message, and then restarted. I didn't lose any data, but it made me nervous. As with earlier versions of Office 2010 Standard, you may want to wait for the inevitable Service Pack before considering an upgrade.

What about Access 2010, the latest version of Microsoft's long-established database app? The big news is its enhanced powers to publish a database to the Web and the convenience provided by the new Backstage view. For details, see our forthcoming separate review by Samara Lynn. An early peek at her results shows that Access lags behind competitors Filemaker Pro and Quickbase in some respects, making it one of the few parts of the suite that doesn't lead its product category on the Windows platform.