Office 2016 released!

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of the latest incarnation of the Office suite of products, this time named Office 2016. The set of products remains largely the same, with the addition to Office Sway to the family of Office products.

In this release, the main focus is in enable better teamwork in the native Office applications, just like has happened in the web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. For instance, we finally have real-time editing across team members in Word! Very cool.

Another nice feature is the ability to work directly with Skype for Business (ex-Lync) from within the most common applications, such as Word or Excel. No more jumping around between different applications.

From the developer perspective, the extensibility points and technologies are largely the same. The web- based REST API for Office 365 continues to evolve, which is great.

MSDN Downloads already has a copy available of Office 2016 Professional, if you want to get started in developing your own custom solutions for the latest Office version.