Office 2010 Beta is out

We will keep you updated for Academic Edition testing opportunities as well.

Today, at PDC in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced the public beta release of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, Office Web Apps for business customers, and Office Mobile 2010. 

Over the past year, these products have undergone worldwide validation and testing through the most comprehensive set of pre-release programs we have ever run. Demand for July’s Technical Preview was incredible, with tons of customers and partners providing invaluable feedback. As we gear-up to collect input from millions of additional users, I am confident that the final product set will be among Microsoft’s highest-quality releases. ****

Office 2010 provides the best productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser. It is full of new innovations that make using Office faster and easier than ever—including Office Backstage View, Ribbon UI across all applications, photo and video editing in PowerPoint, fast new data comparison tools in Excel, and improved mail/calendar management in Outlook. With the new Click-to-Run technology, home users will also have a dramatically faster download experience. 

In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several exciting new features and products:

· Office Web Apps for business customers, available through SharePoint Server, allows //my and //sharepoint sites to host browser-based Web Apps accessible from virtually anywhere. (Office Web Apps for consumers is still in Technical Preview.)

· Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.

· Office Mobile 2010, which includes mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 and is available on the Windows Mobile marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

I encourage you to experience the benefits of Office 2010 by downloading the beta from www.microsoft.com/2010.