First up is release to manufacturing (RTM). Believe it or not, the next version of Office has RTM'd today, October 11 - at least a month earlier than my sources and many Microsoft customers, partners and pundits were predicting.
(A quick aside: The naming of the clients, servers and services known by codename Office 15 is fairly confusing. Products with "2013" in the name - like Office 2013 or Exchange Server 2013 - seem to be the on-premises/locally installed versions. "Office Next" seems to be the way Microsoft is referring to versions of Office sold on a subscription basis, as well as cloud versions of its Office wares, such as the next version of Exchange Online.)
In an Office News blog post on October 11, Microsoft execs noted what they've been trickling out recently: the set of client apps, servers and services in the "Office 15" wave will be released in several stages.
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