Microsoft offers Office 2013 preview

Microsoft offers Office 2013 previewSoftware giant, Microsoft has offered a customer preview release of its upcoming Office 2013 productivity suite.

The new will launch the concept of "Office as a service" offering integration with SkyDrive, the company's cloud storage service. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO said that the new suit will be the first set of suit designed to be Office to be a service.

Office 2013, which will be called Office 365, will be released at the same time with the new Windows 8 operating system in October. The updated application suite known as Office 15 will offer Office apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook with cloud-based services from calling service Skype, the enterprise social media platform Yammer and Perspective Pixel, a maker of technology for large-screen.

The new version will also come with OneNote for taking notes, Lync, the company's unified communications platform as well as SharePoint for document sharing. The suit will be compatible with Windows 8 x86 processor architecture and Windows RT, an ARM processor architecture as well as on Windows Phone 8 smartphones.

"You give up nothing of the rich capabilities of Microsoft Office when you embrace the Windows 8 ARM device. That's not the junior version. That's the full Office available to you with full capability on this next generation of device," said Ballmer.