14 DAY TRIAL // The first fully-fledged Beta Build of Office 2010 is now available for download to subscribers of Microsoft’s developer and IT professional portals. The Redmond company managed to live up to its promise to offer Office 2010 Beta by the end of November 2009, with public availability of the bits expected any day now, possibly as soon as tomorrow, November 18th. At the time of this article the latest development milestone of the next iteration of the Office System was only up for grabs via MSDN and TechNet, with the website set up to offer public downloads continuing to note that the bits would be served “soon.”
Microsoft has so far dodged all questions related to the official deadline for the availability of Office 2010 public downloads. However, the software giant did indicate that the latest leaked Build of the productivity suite differed from the bits that the general public would be able to get their hands on. In mid-November, Office 2010 Beta Build 14.0.4514.1009 was leaked to the web, although the illegal release didn’t really start growing in popularity until the past week when it became clear that the official version was just around the corner.
Both MSDN and TechNet subscribers can download Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta in 32-bit (x86) and (x64) flavors. Only the English variant of Office 2010 has been made available for download through MSND and TechNet. According to Microsoft, Office 2010 Beta requires less hardware resources than its predecessor. Users will need a 500MHz processor or higher, with 256MB of RAM or higher, and a 3GB hard drive.
Microsoft delivered the first testing milestone of Office 2010 in July 2009. At that time, the Technical Preview was an invitation only testing program opened to a limited number of early adopters. With the Beta development milestone, Microsoft is now ready to share the work it has done on the successor of Office 2007 with the rest of the world as downloads will be public. In this regard, the Redmond company has introduced improvements in the Beta Build compared to the Technical Preview release, including tweaks to the graphical user interface. Keep your eyes on this space for additional coverage of Office 2010’s evolution in the coming days.