Microsoft Office 2013 to RTM in November, General Availability in February 2013

Microsoft is expected to make its newly unveiled Office 2013 productivity suite available for purchase starting with February 2013, recent reports suggest.

The Redmond-based software giant has made available for download a preview flavor of Office 2013 on Monday, and it is expected to announce further details on the application’s availability in the coming months. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, the company is on track to release the software to manufacturers as soon as November this year, and is gearing up for general availability starting with the second month of next year. In November, Microsoft is expected to release to manufacturing all flavors of Office, including Office client, server and services products. Some previous rumors suggested that the Redmond-based software giant might have actually delayed the release of the product to May 2013, but it seems that this is not the case. However, Mary Jo Foley notes that there might be some enhancements headed to Office 2013 during that month, although specific info on what they might include was not made available.

One other interesting aspect that needs to be brought in the spotlight is that Windows RT devices will arrive on shelves starting with October this year, and that they will sport Office 2013 preloaded. However, it appears that only the preview flavor of the application will be available for users at that time, since the RTM will land only one month later. Microsoft confirmed Office to be part of its Windows RT offering, and also showed it loaded on its own such devices, the Surface tablets. Office 2013, or office 15, as it is known internally, was unveiled to the world with a brand new user interface on top of various performance and functionality enhancements.

The productivity suite was redesigned to fit the upcoming Windows 8 platform, which should reach its commercial availability status on October 26th this year. Microsoft even said that Office 2013 would be at its best on Windows 8 devices.

Microsoft Office 2013
Image credits to Microsoft

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