Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V Beta Available

When it comes down to helping customers embrace new technologies, Microsoft has made some rather laudable efforts, and the company is by no means showing any signs that it is ready to stop. Releases such as the Microsoft Application Virtualization solution are set up to streamline the adoption of new company products, while cutting down deployment and management costs. The Redmond company has already offered early adopters the Release Candidate milestone of App-V 4.6, a build designed to help companies transform apps into centrally managed virtual services, and that is set up to play nice with the latest release of the Office System, Office 2010 Beta. In addition, the software giant has also made available for download the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V (Beta).

“The Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V enables Office 2010 client products to be sequenced and deployed with Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V),” the company noted. “This kit includes the components required for Office license activation.”

The availability of the Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V (Beta) and of the App-V 4.6 RC concomitantly with the public Beta of Office 2010 is by no means a coincidence. It is in fact the result of coordinated work inside the Redmond campus, in order to ensure that early adopters will be able to use Office 2010 Beta and App-V 4.6 RC in tandem.

“Throughout the process of building Office 2010 the App-V and Office teams have been working very closely to make sequencing Office 2010 Beta possible with App-V 4.6 RC! We have taken the feedback and requests from post-Office 2007 and App-V 4.5 releases, and have been hard at work implementing a solid integration experience for Office when App-V 4.6 releases in H1 2010,” Andrew Montgomery, senior program manager Microsoft Application Virtualization, explained.

Customers already testing Office 2010 Beta and looking to sequence the public testing milestone of the next generation of the Office suite with App-V 4.6 RC will, first of all, need the Office 2010 Beta bits. In addition, the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V (Beta) is also a requirement, as is the App-V 4.6 RC, which is currently available exclusively through Microsoft Connect. Microsoft has also made available an App-V recipe for sequencing Office 2010 Beta, which can be grabbed via Microsoft Connect.

“For detailed information on whether your environment meets the requirements of Office 2010 and App-V 4.6 RC, please refer to the App-V recipe. We are providing a recipe to support the sequencing and testing of these pre-release products on Microsoft Connect. Please provide feedback via Microsoft Connect, by choosing FEEDBACK once logged into the App-V 4.6 Program,” Montgomery added.

Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V (Beta) is available for download here.
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.