Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 finally reached RTM!

The time we’ve been waiting for has come. The Microsoft Office team just announced that SharePoint 2013 (and Office 2013 of course) has been signed off and is now RTM. It wont be long until we can get the final builds of these awesome products!

Words from the team

From Office.com:

[blockquote]Moments ago, the Office engineering team signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. This milestone means the coding and testing phase of the project is complete and we are now focused on releasing the new Office via multiple distribution channels to our consumer and business customers. [/blockquote]

From the SharePoint team:

[blockquote]

We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service updates, starting in November through general availability.

Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance (SA) will be able to download SharePoint 2013 on-premise through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. For business customers without SA, it will also be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.[/blockquote]

A fantastic preview/beta

If you’ve been around a while, you know that with the release of 2010 the documentation was "Okay" and code samples were not very elaborate and not many. With the release of SharePoint 2007 it was even worse, lack of proper documentation and samples alltogether when it first came out in it’s beta period.

With the release of the public preview/beta2 version of SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013, Microsoft has done a GREAT job in publishing articles and code samples. Kudos to the product groups for pushing so much great content out in a beta-stage. I can’t wait to get started with upgrading customers and have clients evaluate the new features in 2013.

Summary

With that announced, we’ll just have to wait a few weeks before we can get our hands on the final RTM builds.

Well done, SharePoint and Office PG’s.