Today, Microsoft has introduced Office 2010 at their Worldwide Partner Conference. As rumored over the past few weeks, Office 2010 will bring with it the first free cloud-based Microsoft Office product. This will be Microsoft’s answer to products like Google Docs, Zoho Docs, and other free online office suites. According to the company, Office 2010 web apps will work with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

You can take a look at the Microsoft Office 2010 technical preview page now, which will soon be open to a limited set of beta testers.

Here’s what we know about Microsoft Office 2010:

Web Apps
As we said, Office 2010 features the introduction of web apps that are completely free to use. The online version of Office 2010 will include Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Now, while these are all free, Microsoft does not see them as a replacement for the full desktop office suite. These apps do not include all the bells and whistles that you’ll find the desktop versions, but they do put Microsoft on the map as far as free online office suites are concerned.

Desktop Apps
Of course, as Office 2010 is a major revision, we can expect all the desktop apps also receive a nice set of updates. Here are some of the standouts:

• Outlook 2010 now uses the same ribbon interface found all the other office apps, has much improved search features, and now has an e-mail conversation view.
• Word 2000 10 now lets multiple users edit a document at the same time
• desktop applications can now publish documents to the Web, or saved to the desktop.
• There’s a new copy and paste feature that allows you to pay screenshots directly into Word documents, and also preview your paste clipboard

Get a look at Microsoft’s introduction video to Office 2010 below.