#msIgnite announcement: Office 16 Public Preview for Consumers and Enterprise

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I’m sitting here at the keynote sessions at Microsoft Ignite (#msIgnite) in Chicago, listening to a morning of announcements (and a dramatic intro to the event by rapper Common) – with a lot of anticipation around the details of SharePoint Server 2016 and the Office suite. On that note, back in mid-March Satya Nadella announced the opening of the Office 16 Public Pre-Release Program during his keynote speech at the Convergence Conference in Atlanta, Georgia (http://www.microsoft.com/en/convergence/atlanta15/#fbid=yZlbL-Hz15r), with the Office team provided additional details on the Office blog site (http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/16/announcing-the-office-2016-it-pro-and-developer-preview/)

During his keynote address, Nadella announced the Office 2016 Public Preview for Consumers and Enterprise customers, with details of the program outlined at http://blogs.office.com. The preview includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Lync, Publisher, and Access. Visio and Project are also in preview for commercial customers. Per the announcement, “The focus of this preview is to broaden it availability to not only IT Pros and Developers, but to include Office users at work, school, and home. This is another exciting and important milestone towards Office 2016 general availability.”

This is a major step in the release cycle for Office, and there are a number of ways you can provide your feedback, including the following new resources:

Other things Nadella announced today was Windows Server and System Center 2016 (and enabling private clouds via Azure in your data center that is consistent with the public Azure), SQL Server 2016, and updated Azure Stack, a new Operations Management Suite, and Advanced Threat Analytics. For more details on what is being announced this week, take a look at the live blogging going on over on ITUnity at http://www.itunity.com/ignite-live

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.