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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.

Adobe understands that collaboration is much more about people than it is about technology and has designed Acrobat.com to be easy to use yet powerful. Acrobat.com offers a suite of web-based collaboration applications focused on helping business people solve business problems. “Acrobat.com is poised to become the online destination for team collaboration,” says Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Adobe Business Productivity Unit. This week Adobe ends the public beta and the future of Acrobat.com begins.

Moving out of public beta means Acrobat.com is now offering premium subscription services for businesses, with a limited free service still available. Premium Basic and Plus subscriptions both offer online word processing, unlimited file downloads, and premium 1-on-1 tech support, but the Basic plan ($149/year) only allows 10 PDF files to be created per month and a 5 person web conference capacity while the Plus plan ($390/year) offers unlimited PDFs and a 20 person capacity.

Over the next year Adobe has plans to release new features at Acrobat.com including more real-time collaboration tools for documents, a new interface, shared team workspaces, mobile access, social media style updates, integration with desktop tools, and increased support for the development community.

Brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, creators of Google Maps, are hoping for another home run for the Google brand with the developement of an open source collaboration and communications platform called Google Wave. A ‘wave’ brings together elements of conversation and document; riders of the wave exchange information and collaborate with photos, videos, rich text, maps, gadgets, feeds from other web sources, and more.

Wiki-like functionality allows everyone on a wave to directly edit content or comment on specific elements. Real-time updates allow collaborators to see changes being made as they happen. There is also a history or ‘playback’ feature that allows you to see how the wave has evolved.

Google Wave is an HTML 5 application built on the Google Web Toolkit. An open source project with rich APIs, GWave allows developers to build on top of the platform and also promotes communication and integration into other web services.

We think Google Wave looks ’swell’ so far and we’re anxious to see more of this product as it develops.

Source: Google Blog