Office 2010 Technical Preview

A large-scale technical preview program has been launched for Office and Visio 2010, and Microsoft announced that two other products—SharePoint Server 2010 and Project 2010—have reached the technical preview milestone and are currently being tested by some large customers. The Office and Visio previews will be the first opportunity for most organizations to evaluate the upcoming client applications, which deliver some improvements over their 2007 versions and will play an important supporting role for upcoming server products.

Also, Microsoft offered more licensing details about the Web editions of several key Office 2010 applications and reduced the number of Office editions from eight in Office 2007 to five in Office 2010. The announcements came during the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC), which took place in July 2009.

What’s New in the Previews?

On July 13, Microsoft sent out invitations for the first technical previews of Office 2010 and Visio 2010. The “technical preview” label suggests that they are stable enough for large numbers of customers to preview their features and begin testing them for compatibility (with Office add-ons, for example), but some features will be missing. Early preview and compatibility testing is particularly important for Office because of its widespread usage—according to Business Division President Steven Elop, more than 90 million Office “seats” are on multiyear license agreements, meaning that customers have already paid for those upgrades.