Microsoft has made publicly available a preview of Office 2016, due out in Q3, although desktop users will be required to uninstall earlier versions of Office to run it. Meanwhile it has confirmed that SharePoint Server 2016 will become generally available in Q2 2016, with a public beta planned for Q4 2015

Jared Spataro, general manager for the Office marketing team, highlighted in a blog post the transformation of Office to a “complete, cross-platform, cross-device solution.”

“We’ve upgraded Office experiences on the Mac, the iPhone and on the web. We’ve even added new apps to the Office family with Sway and Office Lens. All designed to keep your work moving, everywhere. But that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten where we came from. While you’ve seen us focus on tuning Office for different platforms over the last year, make no mistake, Office on Windows desktop is central to our strategy.”

Some of the highlights of the new Office release include:

• Adding the ability in Outlook attach files from OneDrive and automatically configure permission for the recipients—without leaving Outlook.
• Real-time co-authoring in Word 2016 and/or Office online.
• Tell Me, a new search tool available in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, serves up the commands you need by simply typing what you want to do.
• Data Loss Protection (DLP) tools in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint allow IT admins to centrally create, manage and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. End users will see policy tips or sharing restrictions when the apps detect a potential policy violation.

“Office 2016 Preview is still a work in progress, and while not all of the features we expect to ship in the fall are available for use now, new features will be added every month,” Spataro concluded.

Visit the Office 2016 Preview site to learn more

No reason has been given for the SharePoint 2016 rollout being pushed back, although Seth Patton, Senior Director of Product Management for SharePoint moved to hose down speculation that Microsoft was moving to a cloud-only model.

“We also want to confirm our commitment to delivering on-premises releases of SharePoint for the foreseeable future. We envision a future where we will continue to have customers who choose a combination of on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments for many years to come,” he posted.