SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Betas are Now Available

Some exciting news was
announced this morning at the Professional Developer's Conference in Los
Angeles: You can get started exploring SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 by
downloading the beta trials from microsoft.com/2010.  SharePoint
2010-together with Office 2010 and other related products-ties together your
PC, browser, and mobile device to offer the premier productivity experience.
  

In fact, I'm blogging
to you right now from the SharePoint booth at PDC 2009, where I'm helping
developers see what they can do with the new SharePoint tools.  We've
announced dramatic innovations that make it easy to build new solutions with
SharePoint 2010; see them for yourself and participate in the beta by downloading
the new versions  of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010
and Project 2010.   

Some of the new
features you'll want to explore include the ability to design workflow in Visio
2010 and the interface for surfacing your application's features with the new
Ribbon. If you're a developer working with SharePoint 2010, you can install the
SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 on your Windows 7 machine and develop against
it using new Visual Studio 2010 project templates. These templates make it much
easier to create compelling new solutions and package them up for simpler
deployment, such as the new visual web part. 

We're also giving you
easy new ways to connect with your social network.  The Outlook Social
Connector lets you connect with people on Windows Live, LinkedIn, Facebook and
Twitter.  There's even an SDK for developers that makes it possible to
extend and customize code and enable great new scenarios for building connected
applications. 

Combining Sharepoint and Office 2010 lets users
communicate in real time through Outlook, not to mention share/edit Excel, Word
and other Office documents simultaneously. And that's just one example of how
combining these tools will help drive greater efficiency.  To dive deeper,
visit microsoft.com/2010