Office 2010 Technical Preview

We’re engaged in the technical preview of Office 2010. It’s obviously scheduled for release sometime next year. This technical preview is a little different for us, in that it’s not NDA. It has been released to only a few people but we’re allowed to talk about it. It’s a nice change because up until now, everything that we test on we’ve not been allowed to talk to you about.

Having just installed it all I really know so far is that the entire suite took me 18 minutes to install. That’s fast for software installation. I also hear that the user experience in Outlook has change significantly.

It installed a Smile and a Frown in my taskbar which it designed to make it easier to provide feedback to them.

I’m all for easy. Previously we had to document the problem or suggestion go into a secure website and upload the information. Other people in the test group would rate the issue on a scale of 1-5 and we’d go back and forth with the development team on defending why we thought what we found was significant. This was particularly true if what we found was a usability issue and not an actual error.

Our goal in participating in these programs it to represent our clients and make sure that we’re providing input so that Microsoft knows what is important to you. We don’t always win these arguments but we try! When we do win, it’s really cool to see the change going forth and making the application work better for our clients.

Since we can talk about this application test, we will. Expect to hear more about Office 2010 in the coming months. I won’t be posting those to this blog as I don’t want to bore people that aren’t interested. Instead I’ll post it to our technical blog. It’s widely read by other consultants so we can help them out by providing information on Office 2010 too. We tend to carry our laptops with us, so if you’d like to see Office 2010 let us now and we’ll show you. Otherwise, check in occasionally at http://securesmb.harborcomputerservices.net