Microsoft announced the Office 2010 prices for the European market. With the exception of the Home and Student edition, the European prices are unbelievably high. Most US companies just convert one US dollar into one euro, which is already unfair considering that one US dollar equals 0.73 euro. Although one has to consider that the language pack has its price, that doesn’t explain that Office 2010 Professional costs almost twice as much in Europe as in the US.

The good thing is that you can get Office cheaper if you only buy the product key without the DVD. I have been criticizing Microsoft’s practice of selling software in colorful boxes as if the internet didn’t exist. It appears Microsoft has finally arrived in the internet age. Let’s just see when the boxes become history. What I find remarkable is how big the price difference is.

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Microsoft’s Office 2010 website was experiencing severe problems today. I suppose the interest in the upcoming Office suite is tremendous. Below you will find all the official Office 2010 video presentations I am aware of. It is possible that you are still seeing error messages on this page because Microsoft hasn’t fixed yet the problems with their streaming servers. Reloading the page sometimes helps.

I also recommend having a look at this presentation from Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of the Office products. Just in case you prefer a written introduction, I recommend Paul Thurrott’s comprehensive preview. And if you want it a little shorter you can check out Mark Wilson’s Office 2010 feature summary.

If you want to try the Office 2010 technical preview you can register now at the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Waitlist Registration. However, not everyone will be invited to test the pre-release. As far as I know there is no concrete release data for a public beta yet.

Office Web Applications is probably the most interesting enhancement. But it seems we have to wait until August. However, you’ll find a presentation about it below.

Microsoft Office 2010 Introduction

See What’s New in Microsoft Office 2010

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Office 2003 SP3 can already be downloaded for some weeks now. The Microsoft Update Product Team Blog announced that SP3 will be available via Microsoft Update at the end of February. I suppose that means that you will also see it in WSUS or in your third party patch management solution. So you can use the remaining time to decide whether you would like to push it to your clients or not.

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Office 2007 SP1 is now available for download. Microsoft says that this service pack improves stability, performance, and security. You could also say that it is just a collection of patches.

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You probably heard that Microsoft is going to release Office 2007 SP1 next Tuesday. That is certainly good news to those of us who are planning to deploy Office 2007 soon. However, I find it remarkable that so little is known about the new features of this service pack. Microsoft doesn’t even tell us what kind of updates will be included.

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Todd Bishop blogged about Steve Ballmer’s recent statements concerning the competition between Microsoft and Google. Bishop gave an assessment I’ve read so often since Microsoft’s announcement of Office Live Workspace. Typically expressions such as “online editing” or “online collaboration” are mentioned then. And they would usually say that Google does it but Microsoft does not. I never understood what they are talking about. Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

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Office 2003 SP3 is available for download. The main new features are better Vista support, better interoperability with Office 2007, and improved security. It might make sense to rollout this service pack together with Office 2007 since it is possible to run both Office versions on the same computer.

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Reuters reports that Microsoft offers now a pay-as-you-go model for Office 2007 in South Africa. First-time users can buy a three-month subscription for $28.54. The official justification for this move is that software becomes affordable for customers in the emerging markets this way. However, I have doubts that this is the real motive.

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Do you get stomach ache whenever you think about the complaints you will hear from your colleagues after upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007? I think the new Office user interface is really great! But I am sure you also have these people in your organization who hate any kind of change. And this change is really big! There are two Office add-ins that might be of help to your stomach problem. One is Classic Menu for Office 2007 and the other goes for the name “Toolbar Toggle“.

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One of my biggest worries with the upgrade from MS Office 2003 to Office 2007 is that our users will keep the helpdesk busy with questions about the new user interfaces of Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. The changes are really big. Microsoft now offers a very useful and easy-to-use tool which allows users to find the new locations of commands they know from former Office versions.

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British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) warns (PDF) British schools and colleges from deploying Vista and Office 2007. In their interim report, they concluded that Vista and Office 2007 don’t have must-have features that would justify their early deployment. In my opinion, their estimation neglects some important factors.

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When Microsoft released the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) for Exchange 2003 I wrote an article for a German magazine about it. IMF is quite impressive compared to other spam filters, that we began using it right away. We have relatively seldom false positives, but recently the IMF identified our own newsletter as spam. So I wanted to add the sender of the newsletter to the Safe Senders list of Outlook 2003 on all our machines using Group Policies.

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