Betas for 2010 Products

Public beta releases have appeared for versions of Office, Project, SharePoint, and Visio that will probably appear in June 2010. The Nov. 2009 betas are feature complete, meaning that they are close to what Microsoft plans for production versions. Consequently, these releases offer an early opportunity for organizations to evaluate the upcoming versions in depth and make decisions on their deployment.

Feature-Complete Previews of 2010 Products

Feature-complete previews of the following products are now available:

Office 2010. The next version of the Office suite for word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, database, and presentation applications will deliver many improvements to specific components. For example, Outlook will add features to reduce e-mail overload, such as the ability to opt out of specific e-mail conversations, Excel will improve charting and data filtering, and PowerPoint and Word will include tools for editing embedded video. The Office 2010 user interface (UI) will enable more customization by users and includes a new Backstage mode for tasks that affect an entire document, such as editing document properties, saving, and printing. Unlike previous versions that were 32-bit only, Office 2010 will be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit (x64) versions. It will run on Windows XP SP2 or later.