Soon after Office 2010 was pre-announced at TechEd copies began to circulate on the ‘net. I’m not sure of the source of these but like the unofficial Windows 7 builds, they are probably best avoided.

There is a way to add yourself to the list to be considered for the Office 2010 technical preview when it is released in July though – there are no guarantees that you will be successful (it is a limited programme), but worth a try anyway. For those whose applications are successful, the products available for preview will be Office Professional 2010 and Office Visio 2010.

There’s not a huge amount of public information about Office 2010 yet, but we do know it will feature web applications, more extensive use of the ribbon user interface and will be available in both 32- and 64-bit modes. In addition, Groove gets a new name (SharePoint Workspace) and both SharePoint Workspace and OneNote will be in the Professional Plus SKU (which replaces Enterprise Edition). It looks like Visio and Project will still be sold as separate products.