It's Office 2010: First technical previews due in Q3

Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews from the applications suite we can now call cheap office professional 2013 plus , is going to be given to special participants -- probably in small group at first, much like before -- in the third quarter of the year.

Julia White, a product manager for that Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews this small group of initial testers will most likely still number within the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it'll exceed the typical MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. Together with this particular development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially given that they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.

Today's news is piggy-backed alongside the announcement, made official Tuesday night, that Exchange Server 2010 will enter its first public beta phase on Wednesday. Betanews will have more details to share relating to this news the moment the gates are officially opened, though we were told that many of Exchange Server's new features will make utilization of what is a totally changed microsoft office 2013 component.

That could make Exchange difficult to test for the time being, especially since Outlook 2007 -- a lot of whose originally planned changes didn't make the final cut -- won't have facilities for new Unified Communications features. Many of those UC features have yet to be announced, though don't be surprised these to show up in Outlook 2010. Radically improved handling of voicemail capability is slated for both buy office professional plus 2013 and subsequently Outlook, White told us. Even the very first betas of ES 2010 includes the power for Outlook to show textual previews of voicemails, with the server translating voice messages into text.