And so the wait is over. After more than a year of worldwide validation and testing, through the most comprehensive set of pre-release programs Microsoft has ever run, and with tens of thousands of customers and partners providing invaluable feedback, it is finally time to release to an expectant public.
The Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, Office Web Apps for business customers, and Office Mobile 2010 public beta release was officially announced yesterday (November 18) at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.
Kurt DelBene, senior vice president of the Office Business Productivity Group, made the announcement as he closed the Day 2 keynote session with a bang, saying. “Today marks the first time that millions of people can download and experience all the new innovation and capabilities we’re delivering as part of the Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 release,” and then framed this for the PDC attendees by adding: “As exciting as this milestone is for our customers, I also believe that there has never been a better time for developers to build on the Microsoft platform. With a wealth of features and a single, unified business platform, developers can build rich solutions that take advantage of familiar tools and utilize core features of Office and SharePoint both on-premises and in the cloud.”
And of course, this announcement was a key milestone for Microsoft Dynamics ERP, and our Partner channel as well.
Our joint goal is to help our customers become dynamic businesses, through empowering people to be more productive, through simplifying business processes, and through enabling seamless connections with their ecosystem.
Achieving this goal requires more than just a business application – it also requires a business productivity infrastructure that works hand-in-hand with the business application, and provides many of the capabilities on which the business application depends.
With the considerably enhanced capabilities that are implemented in Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, customers who are running this latest business productivity infrastructure alongside a Microsoft Dynamics ERP implementation will move closer to making the vision of the Dynamic Business a reality.
The betas can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/2010, and full news, information and streaming coverage from the event are available at http://www.microsoftpdc.com.
So, to misquote again, “This is one small step for Microsoft…”
Microsoft Dynamics Product Marketing