Sandeep

I was looking for a preview link to download MSI for Office 2013 Preview bits. To much of my surprise when I go to official Microsoft Preview site, it only gives me links to explore Office 365 version. There is also no mention of MSI. Finally when I searched few websites, I found the link to download the bits and successfully download Office 2013. The link is https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/Office2013Preview/enus/ —- THIS IS BROKEN. NO MORE WORKING. You will need to login with your Live/Hotmail or Outlook.com ID to obtain the download. Happy Experimenting! Update: 9/12/2012 It seems Microsoft has changed the way Office 2013 is going to be distributed to users. Here are the steps to get Office 2013 installed on your machine: 1. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en 2. Click on Try 3. Select appropriate category from “For Home”, “For Small Business” or “For Enterprise”. I selected for small business for myself. I wanted to try out the enterprise features as well so I created one more account later (:) 4. Once you complete the account registration process and log in to your account at (https://portal.microsoftonline.com/), you will see the dashboard similar to the image below: 5. Click on the Download Software Link 6. On the next screen you will see the language and version selection as displayed below: 7. You are almost there. You will need internet connection throughout the installation. Once you get the one click installer, it will download the required software and install it on your machine. 8. I have installed Office 2013, it looks like below on Windows Server 2012

Background: Primarily as a developer, I always wanted an online service which is free for me to put my projects under source control. I could find few paid TFS hosted services but I was not ready to put sample projects or source code which has no real dollar value associated under a paid service. Secondly, I used to give sessions on TFS & source control and main problem for my students was to perform hands on practice when they are not at the lab. I used few alternatives like CodePlex by using community projects, VPC and Handson Lab environment at MSDN etc. but all those were/are still workarounds. Lastly, deploying & implementing TFS is a relatively big effort for companies who want to ’test the water’ first before diving deep. It sometimes becomes a real challenge to coordinate TFS implementation and promote usage among teams without a ’test’ or ‘dogfood’ environment. Team Foundation Service: TFS as a service by Microsoft at http://www.tfspreview.com This is a positive step towards developer empowerment. Specially - this will be helpful for all small, medium and large enterprises where developers and IT teams struggle to set the working environment for learning TFS and source control practices. Also not only this, it will be a boost for all freelance developers who struggle to maintain source control for their code & delivery while keeping the cost to the client low. While the service is in preview mode, the feature-set is still very rich and most importantly users can get started for free. The website has a mention that when the service is out of preview mode, the free services will still continue(* - may have reduced functionality or may be not) and there will be paid services as well. I sincerely hope Microsoft will continue to offer free services at least for Source Control and Continuous Bulds. Learn: The website also has a menu named “learn” and the content are amazing. It is mostly step-by-step and easy to understand and practice. Here is a direct link for ‘Learn": http://tfspreview.com/en-us/learn/start/connect-to-vs/