Microsoft is to make a significant portion of the next version of its Office productivity suite available over the web.

Cut-down versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and Word will be released to more than 400 million Windows Live account users.

An on-premises version of Office Web applications will also be available to 90 million Office annuity customers, as well as through Microsoft Online Services to users who purchase a subscription as part of a hosted offering.

Microsoft will next month release a technical engineering preview of Office 2010, giving a first look at the forthcoming product.

Office 2010 and Office Web applications are due to be available in the first half of next year.

The major objective of the new suite is to “deliver the best productivity experience across the PC, mobile phone and browser,” said Microsoft Office client product manager Chris Adams.

New Office features that could appeal to businesses include broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualisation capabilities in Excel, and co-authoring in Word. A tool called Office Backstage will give greater control over the behind-the-scenes options for documents.

The Outlook email client will have a new “conversation view” to thread related conversations to help with the growing volumes of email and other communications such as voicemails. A Conversation Cleanup tool looks across all email threads and reduces duplicated information.

The cut-and-paste feature in Word is also to be updated.

“Cut and paste has not changed for about 10 years, but we’re changing it so that there will be options to keep the format of the text to be pasted into the document, or merge the format with that currently in the document, or paste as straight text,” said Adams.

There will also be fewer product versions, down from eight to five. Office 2010 will be delivered in 32- and 64-bit formats, installable on Windows XP with service pack 3,
as well as Vista and the yet-to-be-released Windows 7.

Two of the five versions are for corporate customers ­ – Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 and Microsoft Office Standard 2010 – ­ which look likely to be available only via volume licensing. Both include usage rights for on-premises web applications.

Chrome threatens to take shine off Windows

Google aims to challenge Microsoft’s dominance by developing its own streamlined operating system (OS).

Google Chrome OS will be an open-source, “lightweight” OS, set to be available in the second half of 2010. Barely more than a boot mechanism topped by a Windows-like interface running on a Linux kernel, it will strip out much of the complexity of other operating systems.

The company has specifically targeted Chrome OS at netbook users, and has so far offered little detail. But in designing an OS capable of only running applications in the cloud, Google may have limited its appeal for corporate users.

“Will Chrome OS make it into the enterprise? That depends if the enterprise is going to change,” said Mike Davis, senior analyst at Ovum. “It has real potential for any organisation whose staff are highly mobile and using netbooks already, but most businesses remain wired infrastructure and desktop-based, and do not want to send all their stuff over the internet.”