New Office Reaches RTM!

[Brink]

Today we reached an important milestone in the development of the new Office.

Moments ago, the Office engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. This milestone means the coding and testing phase of the project is complete and we are now focused on releasing the new Office via multiple distribution channels to our consumer and business customers.

This is the most ambitious release of Office we've ever done. It spans the full family of Office applications, servers and cloud services. The new Office has a fresh, touch friendly design that works beautifully on Windows 8 and unlocks modern scenarios in social, reading, note-taking, meetings and communications. We are proud to achieve this milestone and are eager to deliver this exciting release to our customers.

General availability is planned for the first quarter of 2013. Starting October 19, customers purchasing Office 2010 from local retailers or resellers will receive the new Office for free upon availability. Customers will also see a preview version of the new Office on Windows RT devices, beginning with the Windows 8 launch on October 26.

Additionally, we have a number of programs that provide business customers with early access so they can begin testing, piloting and adopting Office within their organizations:
•We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service update, starting in November through general availability.
•Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download the Office 2013 applications as well as other Office products including SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013 and Exchange 2013 through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.
•IT professionals and developers will be able to download the final version via their TechNet or MSDN subscriptions by mid-November.

Please stay tuned for more specifics on general availability dates and other Office launch news. In the meantime, if you'd like to give the pre-release version a try, you can visit office.com/preview.

Thank you to the millions of people who have been testing early releases of the new Office. We are grateful for your support. Your invaluable feedback has helped us make the new Office the best Office ever.

Read more at source:
Office News - Office Reaches RTM!

 

[Lomai]

Thanks Shawn for the update.

Have a great day and regards

 

[Brink]

You're welcome Lomai. I hope you have a great day as well.

 

[v0id]

Awesome!

 

[x BlueRobot]

That means my preview edition will become invalid soon.

 

[win7]

Any idea when the preview will run out?

 

[x BlueRobot]

Any idea when the preview will run out?

Think it is 60 days after the RTM edition has been released.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Has anyone installed the actual RTM version yet? I downloaded them from TechNet last night, but haven't done any installing yet.

 

[z3r010]

Installed, hated it as much as the preview and uninstalled within 1 hour.

 

[Joan Archer]

Hopefully Office 2010 will go on for a good time yet, only bought ours a couple of months ago when hubby got the laptop and we went from the 2007 version.

 

[x BlueRobot]

My backup for when Office 2013 Preview expires is my Open Office 3

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
It was HORRIBLE
re-installed Office 2010 afte a couple of hours of trying 2013.

The new office seems like Windows 8 itself to not understand if it's running on a desktop / tablet / mobile phone and fails to satisfy ANY of those environments completely.

This version of Offce and Windows 8 itself (for desktop) will become the new Vista.

Windows 8 is just FINE on the new Windows 8 smartphones -- to be released in about 3 weeks - but if you've had a peek at them --Ms has got a winner there.

W7 still rules the desktop - especially if you aren't interested in touch screens etc.

BTW for those who say W8 is faster etc -- just tidy up your start services and move the W7 OS to an SSD -- and then performance is fine.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[badtux]

Excellent news. I've been using the 2013 preview since it hit MSDN, I'll check for the RTM. Office 2013 Outlook in particular resolves a number of annoying and irritating bugs in Office 2010 Outlook that have been a constant nagging PITA, such as the inability to properly handle saving authentication credentials when connecting to proxied Exchange servers. No problem with Office 2013. The UI is also quite a bit more consistent, apparently the Office 2011 (Mac) team had some cross-pollination there even if just by osmosis of working in the same company .

 

[ignatzatsonic]

If Office 2013 appears in Q1 of 2013, does anyone have a rough idea of when Office 2010 is likely to disappear from retailers like Newegg or Amazon? I can't recall when Office 2003 and 2007 actually became difficult to find. Does the current version tend to go away immediately on the release of a new version or are there periods when you can easily get either?

I am running 2007 now and might upgrade to 2010 near the end of it's availability (hopefully at a closeout price) to gain a few more years of Office support. I will avoid Office 2013 for the duration if possible.

 

[Colonel Travis]

ignatzatsonic, you can still get Windows 3.1 on amazon.

Seriously, though, I can't imagine 2010 being scarce any time soon. There is no shortage of 2007 right now on amazon. Newegg drops stuff much faster, I couldn't find it on there. I'm no fan of 8 but I like 2013. Trust me, I understand if you want to skip it. Looks stupid but there are lots of tiny improvements which make it worth my while.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Thanks, Colonel.

I hadn't really looked around to see if 2007 was still out there in a factory-sealed state. Maybe I can hold out for a year or two after 2013 appears.

 

[badtux]

I actually despised Office 2010, it was much less intuitive than Office 2007, Microsoft moved everything around and I couldn't find anything because nothing was in any obvious place to look, it was all hidden somewhere in heiroglyphics on one of those idiotic "ribbon bars". Office 2013 moves things around also, but it's far more intuitive about how it operates. It operates more like a tabbed browser application than like the mess that was Office 2010.

Word of warning for those intending to upgrade from the preview to the release version -- the mail profiles in the preview version do *not* cleanly load into the release version. Weird things happen with complex mail profiles. My recommendation is that you uninstall the preview, delete the mail profile you used for the preview version, as well as the mail backup files on the hard drive, and start over from scratch re-entering your account information in a fresh install. You still delete your profile through Control Panel->Mail like with previous versions of Outlook.