I am used to check in advance if a colleague I am trying to contact is available before trying to contact one.

Unfortunately there are people out there who are purposely signing out of OCS or changing their status to ‘In a meeting’ or ‘Away’, even when they are really available, probably just because they don’t want to be disturbed.
When it really comes to the work you are doing that requires total isolation from all means of communication than it is fine to set your status to ‘Do not Disturb’ or ‘In a Meeting’, but if you have that status constantly on then over the time people will figure out that what is shown as your presence status is not real information and they will start to contact you anyway, which eventually causes the more annoying situation of trying to communicate with someone who actually is really busy.

I think that it is very important to point out to your colleagues, your contacts, that abusing the Presence state will diminish the real benefits of presence within unified communications.

Web Office applications will be available in three ways: 
Free trough SkyDrive -Windows Live;
Free to Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance to run as a service inside their firewalls;
For a fee via Microsoft Online Services in the same hosted manner that Exchange and SharePoint are delivered.

Power Point
Power Point BroadCast
Power Point Live - Self hosted using Share Point or Public (hosted by Microsoft)
New insert/play video features
Backstage View – used for e.g. compressing presentation to send via email

Word
Image Editing – e.g. Background removal or setting effect to the foreground
Insert Screenshot  – With the Live Preview of the desktop
Copy/Paste  - With Preview/Select effect to paste the content

Outlook
Conversation View - group messages based on subject around different folders (inbox, sent, etc.)
CleanUp – redundant content
Ignore Thread button
Quick Steps Gallery – e.g. Create meeting from message or New Team email
Scheduler with suggestions on free time

Excel
Trend data – Insert in cell
Slicers – New visual filtering tools

For more information, go to www.microsoft.com/Office2010/.

Rumors about Microsoft Office Web Applications O2010
Following quotes are from:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/071409-microsoft-office.html?page=1
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/07/14/silverlight-office/

Microsoft said in October that Office Web Applications would not allow offline use.
“You have to have a desktop client for reasons of continuity,” Schadler says. “For people who want to work offline, for reasons of confidence and being able to back up and have access to files. But there are times when a Web client makes sense and a lot of those are collaborative situations, when you are working on a document you want a lot of people to see simultaneously, or to know you are always looking at the latest version. The other thing is access to documents when you are not on your work PC.”

Microsoft is positioning Office Web Applications as completing the puzzle of documents available anywhere — PC, browser or mobile device.

A Microsoft spokesman says the company is not sharing any level of detail about the features of the applications beyond the fact they will have “essential editing and formatting” functions. Microsoft described the applications as “lightweight” versions of desktop Office applications.

Microsoft did say that SharePoint will be the back-end repository for companies that choose to run the Office Web Applications inside their firewalls. Those applications, the spokesman says, would be hosted in much the same way Outlook Web Access is run from back-end servers.

SharePoint is also rumored to be a required hub that will support printing and other features from the online Office applications and most likely would be the staging platform for the applications themselves because it can act as a Web server.

A video that Microsoft made available showed the applications at work and mentioned that Office Web Applications would run on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Silverlight Office just went into Tech Preview. And just as Google Wave was released early to get it into the hands of developers, so too is O2010 getting Silverlight Office into the hands of .Net developers

Supported Features
- Add contacts on federated public IM services to Communicator contact list
- View presence status of public IM users in your Contact list
- Participate in one-on-one IM conversations with users of public IM services in your Contact list

Unsupported features
- Multiparty IM
- File transfers
- Audio/video sessions

Read more: http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/Windows-7-General-Availability-Announced/
Image Credit: http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/02/04/does-microsoft-understand-simplicity/

Bid Now Sample is an online auction site designed to demonstrate how you can build highly scalable consumer applications.

The Windows Azure Management Tool Sample was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure.

Contoso Cycles Sample shows how the Azure Services Platform can be used to build a supply chain application. .NET Services allows messages to flow between companies across firewalls, NATs and routers.

It is free of charge, you just have to promise to behave well and you have to have account registered at their site.
Already available are training videos that will help you start developing and debugging your UC applications using UC Developer Sandbox.

This video demos our proof of concept.

More information available in Aad ‘t Harts’s blog post.

Microsoft Office 2010

Check out some screen shots that are published as part of the Office 2010 press kit.