Microsoft: Office 2010 Public Beta Due in November

Microsoft said Monday that the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010 will go live in November, as well as a public beta of SharePoint Server 2010.
PCMag.com has already written that Office 2010 looks to be the smoothest upgrade for the Office productivity suite ever; our hands-on of the technical preview of Office 2010 was quite favorable. Office will also come in the form of ad-supported Web apps; last month, Microsoft invited PCMag.com to take an early look.
SharePoint 2010 is designed to tightly integrate with Office in any event, via social tagging, backstage integration and document life-cycle management, Microsoft said. Rich video, audio and Silverlight, will also be integrated. Likewise, SharePoint will also be integrated with Visual Studio 2010, which was also announced on Monday.
Microsoft also said it would add two new versions of SharePoint, including an on-premises and hosted version. Other features include the ability to connect capabilities to line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client; rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform; and enterprise features like Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization, Microsoft said.
The new version of SharePoint also includes the now-familiar version of the Office ribbon interface.