About a week after Office 2010 went gold, Technet and MSDN subscribers are now able to download Office 2010 Professional Plus in ISO format for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. For those of you who would rather avoid the notoriously slow download speeds of MSDN and choose to utilize less official channels, the SHA checksum is: 0E1840BF1AA81077692AF651BEFB75648CD9FAA7. Microsoft has also made available Sharepoint 2010, which is a complimentary enterprise solution for Office collaboration.

Office 2010 aims to bring a more socially-aware and polished experience to the industry-standard office suite. Some of the new features include live collaboration which supports multiple users editing documents simultaneously, integrated video and image editing tools in PowerPoint, the ability to export virtually any document to a web browser, inherent ODF support for Open Office documents and a cleaner, more consistent ribbon bar experience across all Office applications.


Two days ago, Microsoft also went live with its free, cloud-based companion to Office 2010 -- docs.com. It seems to be a slick competitor to Google Docs has been released under the “beta” label. Interestingly, only Facebook users are allowed exclusive access and there isn’t word on a definite release date for the rest of the world.

If you are not an MSDN or Technet subscriber, you will have to wait until Office 2010 hits store shelves. Retail pricing should be $149 for Home & Student, $279 for Home & Business and $499 for Professional. As an added incentive to buy Office now, those who choose to buy Office 2007 in the meantime will be able to upgrade to 2010 for free.