Last night at the CTICC the Microsoft Office South Africa team demonstrated to a few of us the capabilities of Microsoft’s latest Office suite, Microsoft Office 2010.

Microsoft has set its focus on online editing and social media integration with its latest Office 2010 package. With Office 2010 users are now able to collaborate and work together on documents and spreadsheets at the same time with the new Office Web Apps.

Office 2010′s online editing capabilities are really astounding and I see it at a aim at Google’s Docs application that also allows users to edit documents and spreadsheets online. Users won’t feel uncomfortable with the Office 2010 online editing software as it replicates the same interface than you would see when editing you file in either Word or Excel.

Microsoft also souped up their email application, Outlook 2010, by adding some new nice to have features and also adding social networking capabilities with its new Outlook Social Connector

“Through Outlook, people can keep track of email conversations, stay up to date with their co-workers, friends and family, see Facebook updates and LinkedIn pictures for their e-mail contacts, and add a contact as a friend on social networking sites — without ever leaving the application,” said Bester who demonstrated the Outlook features.

The Outlook Social Connector currently only supports LinkedIn and MySpace but they are busy with Facebook and Windows Live integration.

It is evident that Microsoft is worming themselves into Cloud Computing to compete with other providers like Google with the release of Office 2010, and from what I have seen they are doing a great job. Office 2010 might just be the saviour for their Office suites as Windows 7 was to their operating systems.

Office 2010 also comes in a lot cheaper than previous versions, starting from R899 for the Student Home edition and  the Office Web Apps will be free to use through a Windows Live account.

There is also a beta program available to share and edit document on Facebook, if you are interested in being part of the beta, search for Docs on Facebook and apply for a beta application.