The First Leaked Taste of Office 14 Alpha

The first taste of the next iteration Office 14 is now available to the public, via a set of screenshots leaked from the Alpha Build of Office 14. While the translucency barrier introduced for Windows 7 by Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, is now lifted with the public Beta 1 for the next version of the Windows client, the same is not the case for the Office 14 development process, which has just debuted into Alpha. In all fairness, Microsoft failed to offer any comprehensive details related to Windows 7 throughout the Milestone (M1, M2, and M3) releases, and, in this context, it's really no wonder that mum's the word when it comes down to Office 14 Alpha.

The software giant did, however confirm that it had released Office 14 Alpha, just in time to give a certain degree of legitimacy to screenshots leaked from the successor of the Office 2007 System (via Wzor).

The screenshots reveal that Microsoft has started testing the Alpha versions of Access, Excel, Groove, InfoPath, InterConnect, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, SharePoint Designer, Vizio, and Word, in addition to the Office Web applications announced back in October 2008, and designed to take the Redmond company's traditional desktop-centric productivity suite into the Cloud.

Information offered alongside the Alpha version of Office 14 reveals that the successor of the Office 2007 System will be labeled as Office 2009, increasing the chances for the RTM (release to manufacturing) stage to be planned for 2009. At the same time, it appears that Microsoft is targeting a Beta release of Office 14 for May 2009.

However, the Redmond giant has offered no indication whatsoever about where it is heading with the development process of Office 14, or when the users will be able to expect the next development milestone (Beta), or the gold version of the product.