14 DAY TRIAL // The first public preview of Windows 8 has been available to early adopters for over a month, and Microsoft continues to push the pre-Beta release to an as broad an audience as possible.
An illustrative example of this is the software giant’s latest move, making the Windows Developer Preview available under MSDNAA.
What this means is that organizations that are MSDN Academic Alliance members can now offer Windows 8 Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) to their students for testing, according to Lee Stott, academic evangelist at Microsoft UK, responsible for Faculty Connection and MSDNAA within the UK.
The first public pre-Beta Build of Windows 8 was released in mid-September 2011 at BUILD, an event focused specifically on the next iteration of the client and server platforms from the Redmond company.
There are no less than three pre-Beta releases available to the public: Windows 8 Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64), Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) and Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86).
At the same time, both Windows 8 Developer Preview and Windows Server 8 Developer Preview can be downloaded from MSDN, by those developers with valid subscriptions. The pre-Beta of Windows Server 8 is available only through MSDN subscription downloads.
By providing Windows 8 pre-Beta under MSDNAA, Microsoft is essentially allowing organizations enrolled in the program to offer their students a chance at taking the next version of Windows out for a spin.
At the time of this article, the information on the MSDN Academic Alliance’s Developer AA and Designer AA had yet to be updated with details of the Windows 8 pre-Beta availability. But as Stott revealed, admins need to check out the new offerings from the software giant.
Early adopters who want to test Windows 8 pre-Beta on their own, can always download and install one of the public Developer Preview ISO releases.
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.