Microsoft Releases Office 2016

Microsoft will also launch Office mobile apps though their launch will be delayed until next year.

Perhaps the most useful change for enterprises however, is that multiple people will be able to co-author Word, PowerPoint and OneNote documents in real time within the desktop version of Office 2016, a feature previously reserved for Office web apps.

Cortana connects with Office 365 to help with tasks such as meeting preparation, with further integration with Outlook coming in November.

Customers with an existing Office 365 subscription can download the update for free starting today, and those without one can purchase a subscription to get access to the new applications.

The new update brings extra productivity features and new security tools. The feature allows anyone using one of the Office 2016 apps to create documents with other users, all without getting confused about who wrote what and what was added to the document since they last looked at it. Co-authoring is terrific in a business and home setting. Microsoft says the new collaboration tools will eventually appear on the Mac.

The new Office suite will run on Windows 7 and higher.

The new update can also be bought on its own for Mac or PC, without subscribing to the subscription service.

The new Office suite also brings Skype for Business support, somewhat embarrassingly the day after the company’s Skype voice-over-IP (VoIP), video, and text-messaging platform took a 15-hour outage.

Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system, for instance, is being billed as “Windows as a Service” to reflect a continual, cloudlike update cadence.

The features sound pretty interesting and having your documents connected online and to the cloud sounds like a great idea and it might even make some Google Docs users switch back to Office. Basically, Microsoft Office is an office suite applications for servers and service, which contains like of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has begun offering GigJam in a private beta, and it plans to make it available in Office 365 sometime next year. Office 365 Groups are now integrated into the Outlook client app and available on mobile devices via the Outlook Groups app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. If you’re an Office 365 Home ($10/month) or Personal ($7/month) subscriber, you can install Office 2016 apps at no additional cost.