Office 2010: the details you need to know

The future success of Office

Elop also talked up the future of Exchange in the cloud: "What we think is in five years, 50 per cent of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud."

Exchange will also include a Mail Tips feature designed to prevent embarrassing email faux pas! According to Capossela, this will "warn users from making embarrassing missteps before they hit send on problem emails - such as accidentally emailing a big distribution list or sending email when a recipient is out of office, not to mention reducing extra steps and calls to the helpdesk. Those are features I'm sure we can all appreciate."

If you're interested, a public beta of the Exchange 2010 is available for download. Also news this week is that Microsoft has made a version of Office 2008 for Mac available for trial download.

One thing's for sure, Microsoft is determined to prolong the success of Office and is prepared to keep reinventing the software to do just that. Speaking in February, Steve Ballmer praised Office's resilience against competition. "Open Office has been competing with us for a number of years but we keep competing. It doesn't go away.

"We think we have a superior offering and we are priced well. You may have noticed we decreased the price of Office around the world and there's enough elasticity that we have more than made up in unit value for what we gave up."

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