Microsoft is gearing up toward the release of the first public testing Build of the next iteration of the Office System. The Redmond company confirmed officially, at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, that it would start offering public downloads of Office 2010 Beta as early as next month. Come November 2009, the general public will get the chance to download, install and test drive Office 2010 Beta for free, the software giant confirmed. Microsoft did not reveal the specific availability deadline for Office 2010 Beta, and as such, testers and early adopters will have to exercise patience a little longer.

The past week, a new development milestone of Office 2010 made it out of Redmond and into the wild. Office 2010 Build 14.0.4514.1009 was leaked and offered for download from various illegal third-party sources, but especially BitTorrent trackers. It was not the first time that a Build of Office 2010 was leaked to torrent websites, but it is the most recent testing milestone that became available outside of Microsoft and the company’s closed circle of testers, signaling that progress was indeed being made on the development of the productivity suite.

Microsoft initially released Office 2010 in July 2009 via a limited, invitation-only testing program. The Technical Preview of Office 2010 was a precursor of the Beta build, but at that time the Redmond company did not consider the release ready for wide distribution. I have been a member of the Office 2010 Technical Preview program since day one and using the development milestone ever since on multiple machines, and only encountered minor glitches. As far as I can tell, Office 2010 Technical Preview sits at the same level as Windows 7 Milestone 3 quality wise. Yes, there are some bugs, but they’re inherent to any product in development.

If anything, I was surprised of how stable and reliable Office 2010 was even ahead of the public Beta milestone. Microsoft has also worked to make the next version of the productivity suite faster, cleaner and more intuitive via the Ribbon/Fluent GUI. I would say that it’s definitely worth a download and a test drive once Office 2010 Beta becomes available. At the start of this month, Robbie Bach, president, Entertainment and Devices Division, noted that the RTM version of Office 2010 would be offered to customers in spring 2010.