Microsoft launches online Office 2007 preview

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dipdude

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Microsoft has unveiled what it calls an online "test drive" for the Microsoft Office 2007 System, amounting to a quasi-web-enabled version of Office that runs within a web browser. The preview is intended to give users a chance to try out the new version of Office without installing the beta on a computer. The trial requires Citrix support and Internet Explorer 5.5 or later.

So far, the trial has been a hit. There has been a "wait" since late last night to try the beta, as Microsoft has throttled the numbers of simultaneous users that can try the preview system. At the time of writing, new users were being warned of 150 minute waits. (In our experience, the wait ticks away quickly; in one instance, 50 minutes passed by in only 10.)

Once the test environment is set up, users can explore a limited Windows desktop running Office 2007. The preview can be described as a series of tutorials meant to highlight the new features of the Office 2007 System. For example, Outlook 2007 launches with a fully loaded inbox and a window devoted to telling you what you should try out. If you're new to Office 2007, the tutorials appear to be quite informative. This is a great chance to check out the Office Ribbon for yourself. (As an aside, we spotted a handful of errors in the tutorials, including references to the new Office button being in the "upper-right corner," when it's actually on the left. Heads up, new users.)
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060627-7141.html
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/testdrive.mspx
 
I'm testing the Office 2007 Beta 2 for a long time now. Its very well known now that the Office 2007 GUI is a complete change from any other Office version. The change is for good and it makes working on it much easier even for noobs.

The Online version of the same is out now. Here's some of the screenies that I took during my short test drive. It needs a browser plugin called "Citrix". I've tested it on my 256k conn. and had to wait 46 mins. in a stupid queue. The entire thing loaded ever so slowly and the damn thing is totally unusable on my conn. speed. Probably you'll need a 1mbps conn. for it to work as intended.





 
Who woulda thunk it? The new Office 2007 Preview online demo is being served up from an Apache/Linux box!

When I first saw the story on CNET, I tried following the link in the story which took me to a Microsoft site. So far, so good.

The Microsoft site has a nice orange button called "Test Drive Office". Even better: orange is one of my favorite colors, as any Kerika user knows! Clicking on this button takes you to a site that's hosting the online Office preview. Which promptly died, presumably from the unexpectedly large traffic generated by the CNET story, although I can't help thinking that they ought to have expected a high volume of visitors given the publicity they were cranking up around Office Live.

But the way the site died was interesting: it threw a "JAR" error. Wait a minute... a JAR error did you say? That't what you get when a Java program dies! What does that have to do with Office 2007?

Intrigued, I decided to check out the site that's hosting the Office 2007 demo: I looked up "runaware.com" on WhoIs and found that it is operating from Sweden, and is not a Microsoft-owned site after all. Then I used NetCraft to see what the runaware.com site is running and guess what? It's a Linux+Apache environment!
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The Smarter Alternative to Email: Office on Linux?
 
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