Office 365 preview

For a couple of days ago, Microsoft released a new preview of the office 365 family,
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/try-more-products

This release includes the new versions (2013 release) of SharePoint, Exchange & Lync (Which all of these was released for a few days ago as well) as well as Office 2013 Preview.
Office 2013 release includes new versions of (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. In the Home Edition)
Business & Pro Plus also includes Lync.

NOTE: That Office 2013 requires either Windows 7 or Windows 8.
And with this release Microsoft wants users to move towards the cloud with Office as well, since you need to sign up for Office 365 in order to download Office 2013.
Office 2013 Preview users can sign in by using either of two types of credentials: Personal (Microsoft account) or Organization (the Office 365 user ID that is assigned by the organization).

Here a the features as stated at Microsoft.com (For the Home Premium version)

• A personalized Office experience on up to 5 PCs or tablets.
• Powerful new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access.
• Streaming full versions of Office applications with Office on Demand (PC running Windows 7 or 8 and Internet connection required).
• If you’re also trying Windows 8 Release Preview, be sure to check out the OneNote Preview in the Windows Store. Keep your notes, pictures, voice memos, and web pages in one easy to access place so you have them when you need them.
• Coming soon, with the full release of Office 365 Home Premium:
  • Talk to anyone using Skype, including 60 minutes of free international calls every month to landlines in over 40 countries and to cell phones in 7 countries. (Skype account required. Excludes special, premium and non-geographic numbers.)
  • Get an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive online storage for easy access and sharing of your documents.
  • Office for Mac
    

Also when you install Office 2013 you have the option in all the different applications to upload files directly to a SkyDrive folder.And by default when you install it uses the “Click-to-run” install method which is a virtualized & streamed installation, so a cached version of office is available from your computer (Notice when you start installing that you cant right away use Office Offline but you can use the applications, this is because Windows is caching the applications for offline use. Think of it as using App-v)

If you need to customize the Click-to-run setup you can download a customization tool here –> (You can run the setup file there with the parameters setup.exe /download to download the source files.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30344

And also you can download the regular installation files here –> http://www.windowsvalley.com/office-2013-customer-preview/

This preview release has been launched in four different “packs”

Home Premium Preview (For the common household for up to 5 PCs or tablets)
Small Business Premium Preview (For SMB’s includes Lync, and Exchange online)
Pro Plus Preview (Same here)
Enterprise Preview (Pro Plus + some more)

Lets take a quick look at the new pages.

Here is the new Admin center preview, like the previous release I have all my other stuff like Outlook, SharePoint etc. on the top menu.
But I like the new look and feel over it.

Here is new Office 365 Exchange ( Powered by Exchange 2013) This also includes the Calendar and the People pane.

The new EAC

SkyDrive Pro (The web part powered by SharePoint 2013)
When you install Office 2013, you also get a SkyDrive App which you can connect to the SkyDrive Pro.

The regular “Team-site”

And of course you have the admin modules. (Still cant see any new PowerShell functions that I can download)

Lync Administration Center, in this release you can now use Enterprise Voice with Office 365, so far the only available service provider is Jajah.

You can also download a software that sets up your Office Apps to work directly with Office 365.
All users have to do is to enter username and password and then everything gets setup accordingly.

Microsoft has also released a version of Office Web Apps Server. This is

• browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

This server has the same requirements as a SharePoint server.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30358

 
They have also released new versions of Project Server 2013 and Visio, which you can get here.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh973403.aspx?wt.mc_id=TEC_120_1_33 (Project Server)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973399.aspx (Visio 2013)

Word 2013

Here I can also add sharing features like LinkedIn, and Storage features like another SkyDrive account or a SharePoint site, pretty nifty.
Don’t know what Microsoft’s fascination with the color blue but I like it..

I also adore the new Lync client (New one and the old one )
      

With this new release of Office 365, Microsoft is making its cloud product even better! Now fueled with 2013 Server of Exchange, Office, Lync and SharePoint, we end users have a lot of new functionality coming our way.
I am particularly looking forward to how Office 2013 works on Windows RT (Surface)  since it is supposedly going to be touch friendly. But something I’m stilling missing in this release of Office 365 is the possibility to connect O365 with Intune in that way so we can manage mobile devices that are connected to O365 via Intune, hopefully this feature will appear in the future
Since Microsoft released the web portal for Azure last week, maybe they will release the portal for Office 365 in the future?
I’m also guessing this means new certifications for Office 365.