Office 12 Beta 1 Coming in '2-3 Weeks'

Microsoft has sent out the first wave of Office 12 acceptance letters to those who applied for the beta program. The company says it expects to ship Beta 1 in the next few weeks, which, for the first time, will be available via download. In the past, Microsoft has only issued CDs for major Office betas.

"You will be provided with access to the Office "12" Beta software, documentation, and support within the next 2-3 weeks," Microsoft wrote in an e-mail. "But we wanted to let you know now that you have been accepted, so that you can make any preparations that you need."

System requirements for Office 12 include a minimum of 256MB of RAM with a 512 MHz processor and Windows XP SP1 on the client side. For a server installation of Office components such as SharePoint, Microsoft recommends a 2.5 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM.

"We have provided these minimum hardware recommendations here as guidance for deploying Beta-1, but as with any Technical Beta, they do not necessarily represent final Office "12" hardware requirements," beta coordinators said.

Although Microsoft has remained cagey about Office 12's feature set, some details have been announced. The suite will feature a completely redesigned user interface, as well as new methods to make working with documents easier. "Ribbons" will include commands that change based on the current task.

Julie Larson-Green, group program manager for the Office User Experience, explained that the UI had four main goals. "The number one design goal was to make it easier for people to find and use the product features needed to get the results they wanted," she said.

Other design goals included a streamlined interface, a desire to expose more of the features within Office, and designing the application for the full document life cycle.

Microsoft is also adding native support for exporting to PDF and its new XPS file format in Office 12, although it has no plans to incorporate OpenDocument.