Officials at Microsoft have recently confirmed that Office 2010 beta reached a milestone of 1 million downloads in just two weeks since its original announcement at the annual Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles late last month. During the conference, several features of the new software package were demonstrated live on stage, including Office Web Applications and the popular social networking integration functions of Outlook 2010.

The achievement has been celebrated by company officials all week and is viewed as a milestone in the consumer adoption rates of the Microsoft Office platform. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division, stated he was "very proud" of the download achievement in a message posted to his Twitter page.

Back in March, we wrote that the Microsoft Office software development team scheduled plans to release the first closed and non-public beta in July 2009 (Community Technical Preview) followed by the broadly available public beta release in November 2009 and finally a Release To Manufacturers (RTM) in March 2010. Earlier this week, company officials confirmed that the final retail release will be made available in June 2010, just three months after the RTM is available to manufacturers, TechNet subscribers and MSDN subscribers.

In particular, Microsoft Office 2010 will be released in six different variations. These include Starter, Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus. As a result of this information, it is safe to assume that the Professional Plus public beta released two weeks ago includes the full-feature functionality that is to be expected with the 2010 edition of the software.

As a side note, we suggest that those prospective users considering a download of Office Professional 2010 Beta or Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta to use the 32-bit package, as this is the one that Microsoft's development team suggests installing due to its broader compatibility with Office add-ons, enhanced stability, and better performance. We have tested both 32-bit and 64-bit packages and can confirm that the 64-bit applications take much longer to close and fall victim to several stability issues. However, we can be confident that the stability and performance variations should be addressed with the RTM release in three months.

Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Beta and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta can be downloaded here.



Microsoft Word 2010 beta 14.0.4536.1000 32-bit: