Microsoft could be about to reveal major changes to Office

At the start of next month, Microsoft is holding a big press event in New York focused on Office and where it’s going on the productivity front.

Invitations for the press shindig have just gone out as VentureBeat reports, with the event happening on November 2, at 16:00 BST (11:00 ET). It’s evidently an important one as CEO Satya Nadella will be headlining along with Office corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer.

As to what they’ll be talking about, a Microsoft spokesperson said that they will be discussing “the changing nature of collaboration and how we can empower every team to achieve more”.

So we could be looking at new collaboration features for the Office suite, and perhaps Skype Teams – Microsoft’s Slack rival – will get an airing, given that the rumour mill insists we’re looking at a January launch for this product.

Skyping is my business 

Skype Teams will be part of Office 365, although it will obviously be pitched at business subscribers; possibly only those on enterprise plans, though. At any rate, we could know a lot more about it in just a fortnight’s time.

Microsoft also has a major launch event taking place in New York next week, in which the company will talk about the future of Windows 10, and speculation holds that we’ll see a new Surface PC along with Surface-branded accessories such as a keyboard and mouse (which would fit well with an all-in-one PC).

Clearly, there will be no shortage of Microsoft news over the next couple of weeks, and fingers crossed that there are equally exciting revelations in both the hardware and software arenas.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).