In view of “customer preview” release of the next version of Office 365, Microsoft has announced the availability of preview trials of other 2013-branded products. These consist of Lync, SharePoint Exchange, Office Web Apps (OWA) Server, Visio, Project and Office Professional Plus.

What there in store in new Office 365?

The brand new version of Office 365 encompasses an actual service enabled version of the complete Microsoft Office productivity suite. Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Office Division, Kirk Koenigsbauer said that you can possibly test the service-enabled Office 2013 offered by way of Office 365 along with other premises-installed Office apps.

Users are required to install Office Professional Plus and maintain it on their own premises. On a subscription basis, Microsoft provides other Office 365 services that include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

SharePoint 2013 Changes and Improvements

The general model of SharePoint Architecture 2013 is similar to its previous version. However, it has undergone many changes and improvements. These comprises of:

• Numerous platform level improvements and new capabilities

 Improvements in SQL

 Shredded Storage

 Cache Service

 Request Management

 Sharing

 Themes

• Service Applications

 Availability of new service applications and improvements on those prevalent

 Office Web Apps not a service application any more

 Web Analytics now a part of search

• Social

 Microblogging – Helps to share links, content and media. It also allows you to follow websites, people, content and conversations.

 Activity Feeds – They offer a view into current activity that relates to links, content, media and people.

• Web Content Management

 Content Translation and Variations

 Enhances support to the tools and workflows designers’ use

 Search Engine Optimization

 Video and Embedding

 Cross Site Publishing

 Cleaning up URLs

 Image interpretations

 Metadata navigation

• Mobile

 Mobile Browser Redirection Now Automated

 Classic and Contemporary views for mobile browsers

 Targeting different designs on the basis of user agent string

 Push notifications

 Office Mobile Web Apps

• PowerPoint
• Word
• Excel

Additionally, SharePoint 2013 comes with a new storage device called “SkyDrive Pro”. Corporate Vice President of SharePoint, Jeff Teper says, “It works with both the hosted SharePoint 2013 service and the on-premises SharePoint 2013 server.” SkyDrive Pro is highly compatible with SharePoint features of collaboration, social networking, search, workflow, metadata and compliance.”