Office 2013 Public Preview

Office 2013 has arrived!  And even if you're not ready--or able--to move to the latest and greatest when it becomes generally available, you can bet everyone is curious about what clues it reveals for SharePoint's future.

Many point to trends such as the consumerization of IT and the explosion of social computing as forces worthy of inspiring new features in Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013. (See our SharePoint 2013 blog post here.)

As SharePoint expert Dan Holme wrote, "You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize the trends in the market ... including mobile devices, and the blurring of public and private cloud services and on-premise servers and clients. Social and search are clearly hot... Microsoft always works to improve scalability and manageability, and the features of SQL Server 2012 and Windows 8 Server certainly point to significant improvements in those areas, as well as redundancy and recoverability."

For now, you might just want to look at Office 2013, not analyze it. Our own Paul Thurrott offers a trio of visuals: