imageWhile I spend a lot of time writing and speaking about enterprise technology (such as server virtualization), like most techies, I do it using Microsoft Office.  I’m a big fan of Microsoft Office 2007, and I’m always eager to try new beta version of the product suite.  Thanks to the MSDN Subscriber Download’s RSS feed, I found out that the official first beta of Office 2010 is now available for download.  If you have a subscription, you can access the downloads from the following sites:

Just search for “Office 2010”, and you should see the relevant downloads.  Be sure to generate keys for activation of the beta, as well.  I’m not sure about the exact plans for making the downloads available publicly, but Microsoft will hopefully make the beta easily accessible to a wide range of potential testers later this week.

For more information on what’s new, see the official Microsoft Office 2010 product site.  As far as at the client applications themselves, the changes seem to be largely incremental (all apps now have the Ribbon UI).  I’m pondering upgrading my primary computer to the newest beta and will likely post some more details here if I do.  Particularly, I’ll focus on backwards-compatibility and file format upgrade issues (such as upgrading my Outlook PST files to work with Outlook 2010).  Happy downloading!