Subtle changes
So what's new? We've been using the beta for a while - admittedly that essentially means Word as we didn't dare much about with our Outlook - and haven't been struck by the profound changes. The ribbon's still there, but the file tab now opens up some cloudy capabilities like sharing and online back-up.
As Elop said, there's a focus on accessibility across the PC, phone and the cloud - via a browser - with the same user experience on all of them. Microsoft is trying to lead its customers gently towards the cloud, believing - quite rightly in our opinion - that if it forces change on its huge and diverse user base, that will do more to drive them away than anything Google could come up with.
The ability to collaborate is now more deeply embedded into the individual applications, while unified communications advances another step with Outlook Social Connector, which inevitably syncs to social networks.The cloud integration not only allows you to work across different devices, but pick up where you left off when you move from one to the other.
Microsoft will offer some kind of SaaS option, but it's not clear how far this will extend and we understand the BPOS (business productivity online suite) offering won't see its 2010 version until this summer. We'll also have to wait until next month before we can buy the boxed and OEM product.
Finally there's also a fair bit of crowing about how great SharePoint 2010 is - especially all the opportunities it creates for ISV partners and developers. To illustrate this Microsoft broadcast the launch event live via a website built on SharePoint 2010. But the link didn't work for us on either Firefox or IE, so we're not sure what Microsoft expects us to take from that.
