Volume Licensed customers with Software Assurance are next

Apr 23, 2010 06:58 GMT  ·  By

Just as promised, the final bits of Office 2010 are now available for download. However, April 22nd, 2010, marked just the first wave of availability for Office 2010 RTM, as Microsoft gave downloads the green light for MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers. Members of the Redmond company’s developer and IT professional networks can now grab the RTM Build of Office Professional Plus 2010. Both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) flavors of the productivity suite went live yesterday, as Office 2010 is making its way toward General Availability.

Office 2010 GA is still approximately a couple of months away. The latest iteration of the productivity suite will only hit store shelves in June 2010, but Microsoft has yet to deliver a specific deadline. This is only valid for the public. Following the release to MSDN and TechNet, Office 2010 will be offered to business customers next. As of April 27th, all Microsoft Volume Licensed Customers with Software Assurance license agreements will be able to purchase Office 2010. Next in line will be businesses without Software Assurance, starting on May 1st, and only then, over a month later, will Office 2010 hit GA.

Early adopters have been able to download Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 since November 19th, 2009, a milestone launched at the company’s Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles. While the Beta Build was public, the Release Candidate of Office 2010 was offered only to a limited number of testers at the start of February 2010. Office 2010 RC Build 4734.1000 was followed by the RTM milestone, announced on April 15th. According to statistics from Microsoft, the Beta of Office 2010 was just as massive as that for Windows 7, with over 7.5 million downloads in just a few months.

Just days after RTM, reports began emerging in the wild pointing out that Office 2010 had already been leaked. At that time, illegal sources including torrent trackers started offering Office 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4763.1000 ISO images for download.