July 17, 2012
By V. Ganesh
At a press conference in San Francisco Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, unveiled Microsoft Office 2013. Touting this as “the most ambitious release of Office that the company has ever done,” Mr. Ballmer then demonstrated some of the product’s new features.
While the full line-up of offerings and pricing plans will be announced later this year, Mr. Ballmer discussed three new Office 365 subscription services. Each new subscription offer will include the new 2013 editions of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access applications.
In addition, subscribers will receive future rights to version upgrades and also as per-use rights across up to five PCs or Macs and mobile devices.
Office 2013 features an intuitive design that works with touch capabilities, stylus, mouse or keyboard across new Windows devices, including tablets. Users do not need Windows 8 to run Office 2013 and the suite comes with built in social networking and communication features such as Yammer and Skype.
This latest version also includes an integrated view of ‘contacts’ everywhere in Office. The People Card software includes information syncing and activity feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn.
Powered by the Cloud, the new Office will be available as a subscription service. Subscribing customers automatically get future upgrades in addition to Skype world minutes and extra SkyDrive storage space. Office 2013 will be bundled with new Windows 8 applications such as OneNote and Lync for enterprise use.
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