Yesterday, at their Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft announced that the next release of Office has reached the Technical Preview milestone. The announcement included demos of some features, and there are more on their site Introducing Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview (unfortunately the site appeared to be struggling under the load, but Long Zheng contacted me to say he had reliable mirrors of the videos on his fantastic blog).

Office 2010 isn’t the revolutionary product that Office 2007 was, where Microsoft introduced it’s new Ribbon interface, but the Ribbon has evolved (and spread to the places where it wasn’t last time round, like Outlook), and they appear to have added some handy new features. You should check the videos out to see what may be most appealing to you, but there are some things that I think will give productivity gains to most users (albeit small ones, but they all add up over the lifetime of a version of version of Office).

I particularly like the new printing UI in Word which incorporates the printing dialogue options along with the print preview – it removes at least one step (checking the preview before going to the print the document), but it could potentially remove several iterations of checking the preview, altering the print options, checking the preview again, etc. This feature is actually part of what Microsoft call Backstage, which should be consistent across the whole Office suite. Also in Word, the Navigation Pane looks like a handy way to search and manage the order of sections in a large document.

In Outlook, if you’re going to send a message to someone on your Exchange infrastructure who has an out of office auto-reply setup, the new MailTips will tell you that when you add them to the recipient list, rather than you composing the message and sending it before you find out that the person isn’t there to read it. Something else in Outlook that got a lot of positive feedback on Twitter from the people watching the streaming video of the WPC keynote was the option to ignore a mail conversation, which would throw out all the past and future messages in a conversation (the conversation view of your inbox has been promoted to be the default in Outlook 2010).

For the first time, Office has an online version – Office Web Apps provide trimmed down versions of the desktop applications in the browser (IE/FF/Safari). This won’t be part of the Technical Preview, instead debuting later in the year. I don’t know if this has been announced before, but when you look at Google Docs it’s probably an obvious step – Office Web Apps will be free to consumers with a Windows Live ID. In addition, Microsoft will provide a hosted version for businesses (like Google do), but they also allow companies to host them locally, in case you don’t want to give your data to Microsoft (not an option with Google Docs).

Although I’m not a heavy user of Office (other than Outlook), I’m a bit of an Office junkie, so I expect I’ll post more about it up to the release, but in the meantime you can go and check out those vids and you might want to check out Paul Thurrott’s write-up of the Technical Preview on his SuperSite for Windows. If that makes you desperate to get your hands on the Technical Preview, you can add yourself to the Waitlist.