Microsoft has released Office 12 Beta 1 to more than 10,000 testers in a private beta. Included in the Beta is Office 12 Professional, FrontPage 12, Groove, OneNote, Project Professional, Visio Professional, SharePoint 3, and the new Office Server product.
This beta is being held privately, with only approved testers receiving bits. Beta 2, which is tentatively scheduled for March of 2006 will be available to MSDN subscribers as well.
In addition to the usual staples of the Office system such as Word, Excel, and Outlook this beta covers several products not previously part of Office. Groove was recently acquired by Microsoft and is a peer-to-peer collaboration system that includes instant messaging, file sharing, and schedule synchronization. Interconnect is a new contact manager with automatic synchronization (similar to Plaxo) and the ability to digitally sign your contact info. And lastly, this beta includes the Office Server product which will allow many of the features of products like Excel, Word, and InfoPath to be centrally accessible and managed.
Also included in Beta 1 is the OpenXML File Format compatibility Pack which may include the "Save as PDF" functionality.
