I woke this morning to read a very exciting update on the Office blog that Office 2013 aka Wave 15 has been signed off internally and has reached RTM!
This is a great milestone and one that myself and a lot of other active members of the user community didn’t think would happen until during the Keynote at SPC12. As it happens (and happily so!) we were wrong and the RTM is today, apparently, according to Chris Johnson (@LoungeFlyz) this is spot on the day that Microsoft decided on over a year ago as they wanted to hit the date 10-11-12. Which by the way only works in America, not Europe.. 😎
Reading the official Office blog post the download will become available to most channels (MSDN, TechNet, Volume License with SA) during mid November which will include updates to Office 365. (I’m guessing that if you have the SP2010 version of O365 it’s not going to change overnight, but it will be interesting to see what the upgrade path is.) Customers without SA on Volume License agreements will have access from Dec 1st.
I’m excited by the possibilities of the new version of SharePoint, there’s a significant shift in the requirements both hardware and skills involved in implementing it, and I think the next 12 months are going to be very exciting indeed.
Paul.
