office2010mainpage

Microsoft has just gone live with a new portal for their upcoming Office 2010 Beta Release.

The site already contains a lot of information that was previously available about the 2010 versions of Word, Outlook, OneNote, Office Web Apps and the rest of the suite.

There is also more evidence that social media is a regular every day part of our lives is the fact they have dedicated linkage on this new portal to Office on Facebook and Office on Twitter.

There are however two prominent links at the top of this new portal graphic and that is the ones to Download Office 2010 Beta and to Try Office Web Apps. The Try Office web Apps link works and will show you how to gain access to these programs however, the Office 2010 Beta download link is kind of active.

office2010betadownload

As you can see it certainly appears that there are active links to download Office Home and Business 2010 Beta; the Office Professional 2010 Beta and the Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta.

However, each of those links lead to a page that states

The Office 2010 Beta is coming soon. Please come back later and try again.

So when is this public beta coming out?  Well next week Microsoft hosts their annual Professional Developers Conference for 2009 in Los Angeles, CA and PDC is known for big names and big announcements. In fact PDC uses this quote about the event:

PDC is where our biggest names make our biggest announcements

I suspect this years event will be no exception.