Workplace Labs – an incubator within Microsoft testing business-focused technologies that may or may not end up part of future Microsoft products — is showing off this week yet another of its ideas.The latest,
Microsoft Office 2010 Pro Plus, known as “TownSquare,” is a business-user-focused social-networking tool. According to Computerworld, Microsoft will demo the new offering at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 12.TownSquare,
Office Professional 2010 Key, via a layout similar to Facebook;s, provides internal company information,
Microsoft Office Professional 2007, ranging from promotions and anniversaries, to a list of shared-document modifications pertinent to individual users.TownSquare was launched inside Microsoft in January, according to the aforementioned report, and has been test driven by 8,000 Microsoft employees so far.Microsoft has been stepping up its work on a number of other social-networking-related projects throughout the company. At its TechFest research fair earlier this year, Microsoft officials showed off a FriendFeed-like aggregation tool,
Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, codenamed C2, which is likely to find its way into Windows Live for Mobile some time in the relatively near future. And earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a test build of a SharePoint Server plug-in for producing/managing podcasts.Office Labs is working on other new projects in conjunction with different teams at the company. An example: TaskMarket, an online services marketplace aimed at small businesses, which Office Labs is developing in conjunction with Microsoft Research Asia. TaskMarket focuses on tasks created using Word,
Office Pro Plus 2010 Key, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.