During the conference, I’ve been trying to glean what I can about Office 2010. What I’m hearing is pretty exciting and music to my ears as an IM specialist. Here are some of the notes I’ve made:

·         Exchange 2010 will have voicemail and email archiving, voice to text conversion in local languages, and email will have retention policies and ability to enforce legal holds (established by a designated compliance officer).

·         PowerPoint Broadcast is the name for PowerPoint 2010 and it has all kinds of cool features added to enliven presentations.

·         Word 2010 features simultaneous edit by multiple authors. You check out sections of a document and then synchronize changes (“collaboration with control”).

·         Excel 2010 is phenomenal. They demonstrated on a laptop, a spreadsheet with 100 million rows in it (yes, that’s 100,000,000 rows!) and the ability to create pivot tables and extract data in seconds. The audience was totally wow'd.

·         SharePoint 2010 clearly demonstrates that this is the platform for Microsoft moving forward. The message here is - if you’re not on it now, you'd better get on it soon. It’s the storage backend for all these other apps and the integration between them is pretty seamless.

·         Because of the success of Excel Services in SharePoint 2007, Visio, Word and Access Services are being added to SharePoint 2010.

This morning’s keynote included a presentation by a senior researcher from Microsoft. This guy looks like a cross between the crazy scientist in Back to the Future and crazy scientist in Independence Day. His presentation was fascinating.

He talked about the future of computing and demonstrated with technology that is prevalent throughout the conference centre: Microsoft Surface.  This is the flat panel where you use your hands to extract, move, and combine documents, images, etc. If you saw the last James Bond movie or the movie Minority Report, then you’ve seen this. We’re all using it at the show to share business cards (no more physical cards) and get updates on conference events, local weather, bus schedules, and so forth.

If you have a few minutes and want to see something pretty cool have a look at this video. Everything in it is technology that Microsoft in working on now (expect to see this within 10 years). http://www.officelabs.com/projects/productivityfuturevision/Pages/default.aspx (click on Watch the Video and select the Watch as WMV for the best picture).