On April 15, 2009, Microsoft confirmed officially that the next iteration of the Office System, codenamed Office 14, would be branded as Office 2010. The Redmond company is in the early stages of development, but it has already delivered an Alpha version of Office 2010 to selected testers. Subsequently, screenshots of Office 14 were leaked into the wild, and you can get a taste of what the successor of Office 2007 will have to offer via the images included with this article (courtesy of iGeneration).

Microsoft has redesigned the Office logo for the 2010 version as you can see, opting for a less colorful version compared to its precursor, and moving completely away from the concept of the Windows logo. At the same time, Office 2010 will be the release in which the Redmond company will introduce the Ribbon/Fluent graphical user interface to Outlook. In this manner, Outlook 2010 falls in line with the other programs of the productivity suite, and evolves from the graphical user interface used in Office Outlook 2007.

The first public technical preview of Office 2010 would be offered in the third quarter of 2009, Microsoft revealed, no telling exactly when. On April 15, the software giant also pointed to the first half of 2010 for the general availability of Office 2010.

“We are really pleased with the potential of the next version of Office-related products and excited about the value that they will bring to our customers. You will see much more from us in the coming months. I think that all of our customers — people who use Office at home or at work, IT professionals, developers, and businesses of all sizes — will be thrilled about the choice, flexibility and enriched experience that these products will deliver across all types of devices,” revealed Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, the past week.