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What's next for your favorite office suite? At its Worldwide Partner Conference in July, Microsoft announced that Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 have all reached the technical preview engineering milestone. That means that tens of thousands of people were invited to test Office and Visio as part of the Technical Preview program.

While the release is still a year away, the preview shows some of the new features that we can expect. Above all, the next version of the suite will help people work more flexibly.

Web applications

With Office 2010, people will be able to perform Office tasks anywhere with lightweight Web browser versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. They'll be able to access their documents anywhere with an online connection and preserve the look and feel of their documents no matter what device they're using.

Web applications will be available for free to consumers and small businesses through Windows Live, on-premises for all Office volume licensing customers, and through Microsoft Online Services, where customers will need to purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering. Enterprises have the option of hosting their own versions through their SharePoint server or else buying access through a Microsoft hosted service.

Don't expect the lightweight online versions of Office apps to offer the same features as the installed versions. That's not the idea. Instead, Microsoft says it will offer features that make the most sense for people working remotely.

Stronger collaboration

Teams will appreciate the co-authoring features in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010, and OneNote 2010, which make it easier for multiple people to work on a single document. Outlook 2010 will offer advanced e-mail and calendar management features, including ones that let users ignore unwanted threads. The Ignore Conversation feature will let people opt out of office threads that don't matter to them. Just click the ignore button and any future e-mails on that topic will be treated like junk. At last, an Office feature that reduces the noise. This could easily be the most popular feature in the suite.

Outlook is also gaining a novel Conversation Clean-Up tool, which will condense long e-mail conversations into quick summaries, so that you can get all the information you need to catch up without reading every single entry. We're curious to see how well it actually works.

More media

You won't need to leave the suite to edit videos or photos with Office 2010, a recognition that other media are important in document creation. The editing tools promise to be more sophisticated than you'd think for an office suite. PowerPoint 2010 will gain broadcast capability, while Excel 2010 gains a new Sparklines feature that helps users visualize data and spot trends more quickly. We're also curious to see the new Cut and Paste preview option, which will let you see what your document or spreadsheet will look like if you perform a given cut and paste.

Thankfully, Microsoft is cutting down the number of editions with Office 2010, going from the current eight to a new five. That's still too many, we think --customers prefer getting all the features at one price -- but at least it's an improvement.

Pricing for the Office 2010 versions hasn't been announced yet. Microsoft says that they'll launch in the first half of 2010. Delays, of course, have been known to happen.

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