Office 2010 is out of beta and moving to the real world.
Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 is out of development and is now RTM – Released to Manufacture.
The beta testing has ended and the final product will be available soon. Some long suffering cynics might say that Office 2010 has merely moved from one stage of beta testing to a broader form of software testing
Over the next few weeks/months installation packages are made up, disks burned and download sites prepared – the latter will be more commonly used for Office 2010 than ever before.
As usual, there will be a gradual rollout. Office 2010 will be available on this schedule:
22 April 2010 – is said to be the MSDN/Technet release date.
27 April 2010 – volume customers with Software Assurance can download
1 May 2010 – volume customers without Software Assurance can download
June 2010 – retail sales begin.
There will be a big release event on 12 May 2010 in New York at the NBC Studios.
Retail customers can order Office 2010 online from the Microsoft web site – though you’d have to be extremely foolish to do so. Far cheaper to buy Office 2007 from a standard retailer at less than retail price and take advantage of the free Office 2010 upgrade than buy Office 2010 at full price from Microsoft.
The final release build/version number is 14.0.4760.1000 aka ‘Build 4760’.
