Johannesburg, 22 Apr 2010
Microsoft's latest software release, Office 2010, will hit SA's shelves as soon as next month, following the software's release to manufacturing last week.
Microsoft SA's information worker head Albie Bester says the SA market can look forward to picking up copies of the new software for a lower price than the international release. “As with Office 2007, the 2010 release will be cheaper for the emerging markets,” he says.
Bester's price estimates will see a roughly 40% drop in the cost of the new software, compared with its 2007 counterpart. Locals can expect to pay anywhere between R800 for the student version, and up to R5 000 for the high-end versions.
The company will release Sharepoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 at the same time as its new office packages.
Bester demonstrated a few of Office's new features at a media briefing last night, including the company's much-anticipated Google Docs rival, Web Apps.
“This version of Office allows people to work smarter and faster from virtually any location using any device. Given that many people live in their e-mails these days, this is a critical factor and Outlook 2010 takes this to the next level,” he explained.
One of the most notable features is that all the applications from Word right through to Project 2010 all use the ribbon. Outlook has transformed, and sports some exciting changes, including smart conversation threading.
E-mails that are part of one conversation can be grouped together, and it also has the intelligence to separate threads that may have changed conversations, but are still using the same subject line.
To save space in the mailbox, users can use a clean-up function to delete mails that have repeated information, which often happens when you have long reply conversations through mail.
However, more exciting is Microsoft's decision to include social networking functionality within Outlook. Clicking on a mail from a LinkedIn friend will bring up all their details from LinkedIn, within Outlook.
Bester says Office will soon integrate with other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
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