Office 2010 Beta Released to the Public

Office 2010 (or more importantly Outlook 2010) Beta has been released to the public on Technet, MSDN, the Beta Connect site now!

Here are the apps available
Search Server 2010 Express Beta (x64) - (English)
SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Office Web Applications Beta (x64) - (English)
Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x86) - (English)
FAST Search Server 2010 Beta for SharePoint (x64) - (English)
Project Server 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Project Professional 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Project Professional 2010 Beta (x86) - (English)
Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta (x86) - (English)
SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x86 and x64) - (English)
SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x86 and x64) - (English)
SharePoint Server 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Business Contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta (x64) - (English)
Business Contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta (x86) - (English)


These are the new icons…

One of the many new feature changes from the earlier Office 2010 CTP release is the ability to enable color schemes and specifically black. I do like this feature and this color choice since it allows for more emphasis on the document and less on the menus.
MS Word 2010 in Black color scheme

MS Outlook 2010 in Black color scheme

 Message Reviewer showing social networking features

 This is pretty awesome as it shows you the RSS feeds from this person, the emails received, the attachments they have sent me, the appointments I have with them, and the OCS IM transcripts we have had together. (kinda brings a lot of Xobni into Outlook by default)

I think this download is a great thing for everyone to try out… Come and get it!!!

Exchange 2010 Deployment Assistant

Microsoft has released an updated "basic" Deployment Assistant to aid organizations with guiding them through the basic process of implementing Exchange 2010 in an existing Exchange 2003 or Exchange 2007 organization as well as a newly created organization. It does give good information for those organizations that are smaller or only needing some basic information. I think it is a good start for those organizations that are complex in nature or for those that do not have very experienced on site engineers. Of course, I might be a bit biased ;-) based upon my consulting background.

The Deployment Assistant is available at http://technet.microsoft.com/exdeployment2010