Beta 2 Technical Refresh Available Now

This morning, the Beta 2 Technical Refresh of the 2007 Microsoft Office system became available for download.

You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center.

(The download link above is the main download link. You also view the list of all available Beta 2 Technical Refresh updates for client and server by clicking the Beta 2 Technical Refresh link on this page.)

You must have Beta 2 installed in order to patch it to Beta 2 Technical Refresh, so don't uninstall Beta 2.

Why a patch instead of a full release? Primarily because we need to test the patching technology broadly, and this is a great chance to make sure it works well. Patching is the way we release updates to Office after it ships, so making sure it works well is an important part of the beta process.

Please also consider downloading the Send a Smile Feedback Tool to tell us what you think about Office 2007. If you already had it installed from Beta 2, you can continue to use it in B2TR.

In my post yesterday, I posted a list of the most substantive changes to the user interface in the new build. Consider this by no means a full list of changes in B2TR—just those in the UI.

I've also posted a list of Ribbon Control IDs for use with B2TR for RibbonX developers. These should also show up on MSDN sometime in the next few weeks. It's a 1.3 MB download (.zip file) if you need to grab it now.

Note: If you're having trouble installing the patch, try following the instructions in this article.

Note 2: Patrick Schmid is keeping a great log of solutions to issues people are encountering with B2TR.