Office 2010 Hits RC Stage, But You Can't Have It
Microsoft's productivity suite hits Release Candidate, but it's a private party.
Microsoft Office 2010 this week hit the Release Candidate milestone, signaling that the product is nearly ready for prime time.
Interestingly, unlike the public beta release (which was downloaded over 2 million times), this release candidate is not available for just anyone's consumption.
"Microsoft made a release candidate available to members in the technology adoption program (TAP)," a Microsoft representative told Cnet. "This is one of Microsoft's planned milestones in the engineering process; however (we) do not have plans to make this new code set available broadly."
Microsoft said that it benefited greatly from the wide-range of public testing it had for Windows 7 through its multiple beta and release candidate phases, so it's a little strange that the company isn't adopting the same strategy for its premier productivity suite.
Microsoft Office 2010 is slated for release in June.
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Openoffice.org ftw
Most of the Office 2010 enhancements are for Enterprise corporations, allowing multiple users to edit the same document (at the same time!) and deep integration with SharePoint to allow robust versioning, metadata and content approval. Not to mention the "Web" versions of each application allowing Word / Excel / PowerPoint to be edited through browsers.
So in those cases OpenOffice or OfficeXP don't even come close!