MS offers Office 2010 preview

Microsoft has updated the technical preview version of its forthcoming Office 2010 package by adding limited access to Web applications, online versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word, reports Computing.co.uk.

Microsoft Office Live product manager Tim Kimber says the aim with Office 2010 Web applications is to give users the ability to carry on working as usual, but also “to get hold of documents in Internet caf'es on your mobile, or other people's documents".

For businesses, the availability of Office applications through SharePoint would be critical. "IT managers will be able to integrate access to the applications and document policies through Active Directory,” says Kimber.

The Obama administration has unveiled a far-reaching and long-term cloud computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of government computing systems, states CNET News.

Speaking at NASA's Ames Research Centre, federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the administration's first formal efforts to roll out a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and in the process, slash federal spending on IT, especially expensive data centres.

According to Kundra, the federal government has an IT budget of $76 billion, of which more than $19 billion is spent on infrastructure alone.

Apple's sales of its Snow Leopard OS X update are outpacing those of its previous operating-system releases, Leopard and Tiger, according to an analysis by research firm the NPD Group, says eWeek.

The NPD Group's tracking service estimates that Snow Leopard is outselling the original Leopard by a 2-to-1 margin, and outselling Tiger by 4-to-1, during the two weeks since its 28 August release.

Despite the upswell of publicity surrounding its release, Snow Leopard boasts relatively few flashy aesthetic improvements over Leopard, but it does offer a number of under-the-hood refinements. Mail loads in half the time as in Leopard, Apple asserts, while Time Machine's initial backup is 80% faster.