Hot on the heels of the official worldwide release of Office 2010 yesterday, details have surfaced on the next version of the award winning suite - Office 15, or its likely name, Office 2013.
Microsoft Kitchen is reporting that they located a PDF file hosted on a Microsoft-partner owned server, describing details regarding next version of Microsoft Office.
"By the time Office 2010 was released, some Microsoft Engineers had already begun work on the next version (code-named Office 15)."
Microsoft Kitchen also noted that a few Microsoft Employee"s have been writing information about products they are working on, into their LinkedIn profiles - Josh Leong has written on his LinkedIn profile that he is:
"Designing the new visual & interaction experience for Office 15."
And Ben Gable"s profile says he has:
"Designed major new feature to be introduced in Office 15"
The post notes that there are other new changes that have been mentioned across the web, such as Office Mobile 15 being considered in the planning, that Collaboration is a key point in Office 15, and it should see an Improved Automation Framework. The UI change comes as quite odd, considering the effort Microsoft has put into the ribbon, and the integration they have built into Windows 7 and it"s built in applications, so it is very unknown how large the change could be.
It"s best to remember though, that these details can likely change, and this is very early in the lifecycle - considering Office 2010 was just released, it"s likely not many other details will emerge for a while.