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This week Microsoft Office 2010 was released as a technical preview for testers. New collaboration features will be the highlight of Office 2010 applications. Unified and real-time communication products are proliferating throughout the market and Microsoft is hoping to keep pace, along with it’s strong grip on the business world.

Unified Communication – While working in Microsoft Office 2010 you will be able to keep track of which colleagues are online, working on a project, and available to chat or join a meeting.

Real-Time Document Collaboration & Co-Authoring Projects – Everyone knows emailing a document around the office for corrections and approvals can easily turn into a multitude of out-of-sync copies. New features in Office 2010 will allow you to see who is working on a specific document. Groups and permissions can be set to allow specific users to edit sections of a document.

Remote Access – Office files such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides stored in the cloud will be available remotely from smartphones or any Web-browser enabled device.

The ship date for Office 2010 can be expected around third quarter next year. Along with the full-featured suite, Microsoft will be offering a limited Web-based free version of Office 2010 where users can access documents via the browser, and not just Internet Explorer.

Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment firm that recently purchased a 2% preferred stock stake in the Facebook social media company is looking to acquire an additional $100 million in common stock shares. The $200 million agreement in May of this year valued Facebook at approximately $10 billion.

The deal this week for current and former Facebook employees is offering $14.77 per common stock share which carries a lower valuation of $6.5 billion. This is not to say that Facebook is now valued at $6.5 billion, rather that common stock does not offer the same privileges and guaranties for shareholders as preferred stock. “If the Facebook employee has been locked up several years, it’s a good opportunity for them to sell some shares and get some liquidity,” says Stuart Campbell, a lawyer with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle who focuses on startups.

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen last week stated he expects company revenues to reach $500 million in 2009.

Rival platform MySpace finally lost traction to Facebook in the United States this May based on comScore traffic statistics. Facebook has been the number one social network in the world for over a year now.

Source: Bloomberg