Windows 7: Announcing Office 2010 Beta Availability

Today is an exciting day! At PDC we announced the availability of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. If you’d like to be one of the millions of people who try, test and give feedback on the latest and greatest, you can download the betas at www.microsoft.com/2010.

We also announced that Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 beta is available now too, and you can download it through the Windows Mobile Marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

The final release of Office 2010 will debut next year, but we’re excited to allow everyone to start using the new features and tools that will help you collaborate, connect and work better together with others across the PC, mobile phone and browser.

The betas released today include everything we’ve talked about so far on this Blog and much more. In addition, today we announced several new facets of Office 2010 that you can check out when you download the beta:

• The New Outlook Social Connector brings your communications history, business and social networking feeds right into Outlook, helping you quickly keep track of conversations and stay up-to-date with co-workers, friends and family without switching programs or changing your routine. Today’s beta supports SharePoint social networking and will support Windows Live when Office launches. The business networking site LinkedIn will be the first to provide a connector for the Outlook Social Connector early next year.  Read more about the Social Connector on the Outlook Team’s blog post!
• For developers and partners, SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 will combine with Visio 2010 using the tools you know and love, and have new rich APIs and support for industry standards to quickly build content and collaboration applications on the SharePoint and Office platform. We’re also releasing Outlook Social Connector SDK, available for download on MSDN [insert link], so developers can build connectors to third-party social networks. Start testing and building solutions for your customers today!
• A new look.  The Microsoft Office brand will sport a new look next year, reflecting technology innovations in Office 2010. The re-design includes an updated Office logo, a new orange color palette for the Microsoft Office brand, and updated icons for Office 2010 applications that make it easier to quickly identify the Office products you work in.

• Finally, in partnership with SAP, we’re also announcing Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. This new product jointly developed with SAP increases the interoperability of SAP applications with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 to provide complete flexibility and extensibility to compose solutions that blend the worlds of process and collaboration. Complete with pre-packaged integration templates and the building blocks needed for additional applications, IT organizations and partners will be able to compose context from SAP with SharePoint and Office content and collaboration. Duet Enterprise is expected for release in the second half of 2010.

The announcements and releases today reflect years of work for the Office team here at Microsoft – head on over to www.microsoft.com/2010, download the Beta, and let us know what you think!

Been running this since the Tech Preview, and love it. I'm sure all of you will too.