Office 2010 Technical Preview: a first look

Simon Bisson ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Jul 2009

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Access 2010
Despite the ever-increasing popularity of the SQL Server family, Access is still hanging in there in Office 2010. Although Microsoft's desktop database is now looking a little long in the tooth (even with a ribbon UI), the company is trying to simplify things. Access 2010 is starting to become more like its old competitor, FileMaker Pro. Templates make it easier to build databases quickly, and Excel-style conditional formatting adds flair to reports.

Access 2010 also adds tools to help develop Access-powered web applications. You can design and build web forms, and publish to the web from the Backstage. Once you've created a web database, everything you build in it is ready for publishing. Access 2010's web browser controls use AJAX, so you can give Access web applications a web 2.0 feel very easily.

OneNote 2010
OneNote is finally a first-class Office citizen. Often overlooked, OneNote is Microsoft's electronic notebook, with tools for ad hoc collaboration and information sharing. OneNote 2010's search tools are much improved, with a new word-wheel search user interface to help refine searches, and a ranking system based on past search results. If you've picked a specific document in the past, it'll be prioritised.

Microsoft has also improved how OneNote collates information. Quick Filing tools bring content into notebooks from many different sources, including web pages and email. Notes are linked back to the source document, so if you've linked to a specific place in a Word 2010 document, you can jump straight back to the original document so you can see its context — and possibly work with the surrounding information you didn't link to in your notes.

PowerPoint 2010
One of the big PowerPoint bugbears finally goes away with PowerPoint 2010. How many times have you tried to include video in your slides only to find that the player you need isn't on the machine you need to use for your presentation? Video is now supported directly, with a player (and editor) built-in to PowerPoint, so there's no need to embed Media Player into your slides. There are plenty of video effects, including reflections and simple video filters. You'll need to make sure that the appropriate DirectShow codecs are installed on the machine you're presenting from (most of the video formats you're likely to use are supported by Windows 7).

PowerPoint 2010 can now host web videos — just drop in the embed code from a site, and away you go. It's ideal for adding viral video snippets to a presentation, or showing what you've put on YouTube.

Microsoft has helped by simplifying video editing, and you can set appropriate start and end points in your videos, so you don't need to modify your source material. Videos don't need to be local — you can also embed content from online videos. We were able to use content from Vimeo, MSN and Reuters, but YouTube's performance was somewhat variable.

PowerPoint 2010 also includes a broadcast feature. This uses elements of the PowerPoint web application to deliver slides in your users' browsers, simply by instant messaging or emailing a link. Inside a corporate firewall it uses SharePoint 2010 to host a slideshow; if you want to share a presentation externally, you'll need to use Windows Live. We were surprised to find that the web broadcast function was already working — and that slides displayed in Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.

Collaboration in Office 2010
There are a lot of collaboration features in Office 2010 — but you won't be able to try most of them out. That's because they work with SharePoint Server 2010 or Office Web Apps, using them as hubs for shared documents and for version control.

Microsoft calls what it's delivering with Word 2010 and PowerPoint 2010 'co-authoring'. It's not real-time collaboration, more a version-control system with added synchronisation tools. More than one author can work on a document, and you'll be able to see who's working on what page or slide in real-time. Once they save their changes to a server, you'll get notification of updates. You won't see the changes until you choose to save and sync your file, when you'll be able to pick and choose the changes you want to apply to your version. If you're using Office Communications Server, you'll be able to click on a presence icon and IM with your collaborator, adding real-time communication to an asynchronous collaboration.

Things are more free-form in Excel 2010 and OneNote 2010, where collaborators get to see real-time edits. OneNote also adds tools that let you explore the history of a document, showing who added what and when to a page. The ability to slice and dice by time and by author is a useful feature, especially if you're using a shared set of OneNote notebooks to manage the information you're using to create team documents and reports.

The Office stack
Microsoft has done a lot in Office 2010 to integrate the various Office applications with the Microsoft stack. However this does mean that you need to have the full Microsoft stack to get the most from Office 2010. You won't get Outlook's MailTips without Exchange 2010, and you won't be able to use any of the co-working features in Word and PowerPoint without SharePoint 2010 or Microsoft's online Office service. If you want to talk to collaborators, Office 21010's presence features require Office Communications Server and Office Communicator. It'll be interesting to see how anti-trust organisations around the world react to this level of integration — especially in light of the European Union Competition Commission's recent decisions.

Exchange 2010 is already in beta, and Microsoft has indicated that closed Technical Previews of SharePoint 2010 and the Office web applications will follow later this summer — with a more open public beta in the autumn. You'll need these before you can use some of the Office 2010 features — as well as new members of the Office family, like SharePoint Workspace 2010 (a reworked version of Ray Ozzie's Groove).

The rest of the suite
Office is more than the core applications. Groove gets a new name and a new role as SharePoint Workspace 2010, and it provides a place to synchronise Groove and SharePoint workspaces — so you can take SharePoint with you on the road, and work with it offline. Synchronised content is indexed by Windows search, and you can work with it from the Windows Start menu like any other local document. You can even access workspaces from Windows folders. You don't need to synchronise entire SharePoint workspaces: if you only need one folder, that's all you need to synchronise.

Another application that gets a rework is Office's XML form tool, InfoPath. InfoPath 2010 has the same ribbon UI as the rest of the Office suite, and also adds a new standalone form editor application for users who just need to fill in and deliver forms. InfoPath-designed forms can also be uploaded to SharePoint 2010 and used as part of your intranet applications.

Publisher 2010 has embraced the web, and you can use its Backstage to share your templates with other users. Templates can also be downloaded from a web gallery, and a live preview shows you just how they’ll affect your copy.

The verdict
Office 2010 is not a revolution. Microsoft already delivered that — or at least what it thought of as a revolution — in Office 2007 with the arrival of the ribbon user interface. Office 2010 takes that UI on another step, adding Backstage to the ribbon, and the ribbon to the whole suite. Most of the UI features in Office 2010 are tweaks, refining the experience and simplifying the more complex pieces of Office 2007.

There are plenty of new features, but outside of Outlook 2010 and Excel 2010, most of them are again refinements. You're not going to use co-authoring in everyday document creation, while video and image editing tools are once-a-month features, if that. Even so, this is shaping up to be one of the best versions of Office yet. Office 2010 brings consistency back to the Office suite, making it the place for the people Microsoft calls 'information workers' to create, manage and share information. Just remember, though, that you'll need to buy into the whole Microsoft stack to get the most from Office 2010.

There is big stuff coming in Office 2010, if Microsoft delivers on its online promise. However, we'll have to wait until October to get the whole story. What we've seen so far is an evolution rather than a revolution.

 

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