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Whether Windows 8's radically re-imagined usage model catches on with tablet and PC users will depend in large part upon the role Microsoft Office apps will play. If it looks too much like Office 2010, then having Windows 8 relegate Office to the "Desktop" side while mobile-style apps take over the "Metro" side, won't make much sense.

This morning, Microsoft gave out the first signal of how the shift will happen. The first technical preview of The Software Probably Known as "Office 2013" has made its way to select testers, in advance of a public beta now scheduled for this summer.

The last Steve Ballmer keynote has come and gone, and even after the company's overt effort to reduce expectations about product announcements, if you listen carefully, you may still be able to hear the faint sound of a gospel choir chanting about one of the few remaining expectations that was left unmet last night: There was no word on a possible Metro-style preview of Office 15.

In fact, the company's Tami Reller lowered expectations even further by repeating a demonstration of the existing Office 2010 running in a late build of Windows 8, alongside a Metro-style newsreader app, with the two worlds divided from one another by the partition that Microsoft calls "Snap." While Reller's point was that the two worlds could co-exist, there was one world many attendees wish they could have at least peeked into.

In the past few years, one of the game-changing technologies that has helped Dell claw its way back to competitiveness against HP in the server arena is automated deployment tools. These let admins remotely install software on hundreds of clients in minutes. But consider this: If applications like Microsoft Office could be run on remote servers and streamed remotely to thinner clients, even to tablets like Apple's iPad, without installing it to those clients in the first place, why bother with automated deployment at all?

The answer to that question has typically centered around performance. Imagine an application that stutters like Max Headroom running on your state-of-the-art quad-core PC. Yesterday, Cisco blew a hole in that argument, announcing a network optimization service specifically designed for Citrix XenDesktop, the system that powers the revolutionary Citrix Receiver that makes Office run on the iPad.

Atlassian announced today a new version 4 of its Confluence team collaboration software tool.

We covered version 2.9 here several years ago and since then they have been busy adding all sorts of features, including improving the wiki markup and editing tools, using Twitter-like @mentions to notify users with new content, a collection of macros and other automated content tools, and the ability to paste screenshots, videos and graphics directly into the editing tool.

Enterprises have long customized Microsoft Office, using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). Now it appears those technologies will have to make room for HTML5 and JavaScript. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports on a new job listing from Microsoft that indicates that the company is adding JavaScript and HTML5 support to Office.

The good news for legacy shops is that, as Foley says, there is no indication that Microsoft is dropping support for VBA and VSTO. But this development advances JavaScript's supremacy in the development world and demonstrates Microsoft's seriousness about the language.

Apple today opened iCloud.com beta to members of the iOS and Mac developer programs. 9to5Mac was the first to report the opening, and also noticed that Apple may be including a Google Docs/Microsoft Office 365 style Web-based document editing service. The page contains a teaser for iCloud iWork, which says "iCloud stores your documents and keeps them up to date on your devices and the web. To get started, launch Pages on your iOS device and turn on iCloud."

Today, as expected Office 365 came out of beta. Office 365 is Microsoft's consolidated cloud-services system that combines hosted versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync Server.

So how does it hold up to two older offers, Google Apps and Zoho?

Microsoft has said that iPad-style tablets, generally referred to as "slates," that run Windows won't arrive until the next version of Windows arrives in 2012. This big beast of a WP7 tablet announced at Computex not withstanding, this rules out Windows Phone 7 based tablets. But will Microsoft get left behind if it can't bring a slate to market before 2012?

As we reported last week, Citi analyst Walter Pritchard believes that it's not too late for Microsoft to have a "meaningful" share of the tablet market. Larry Dignan at ZDNet highlights one particular area where Microsoft could challenge other vendors: Microsoft Office support.

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week week we look at a couple more office suites for the iPad, an iPad app that aims to improve the patient registration experience in doctor's offices and more.

It's been more than two decades since Microsoft's now-ubiquitous suite of office productivity software was released. Although we've seen numerous free or low-cost alternatives arrive on the scene since then - OpenOffice.org, Google Docs and Zoho Docs to name a few - Microsoft Office still remains overwhelmingly dominant in this space.

Forrester reported two years ago that 80% of companies were running some version of Office, and this number hasn't budged much. In a recent report, Forrester noted that all respondents were running Office, with 74% of IT departments saying they supported Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier. By contrast, only 8% said they utilize Google Docs and 1% were on Zoho Docs.