Free Office 2010 RTM Copies to Beta Testers

Microsoft Office Professional 2010

Microsoft has started handing out free copies of the latest iteration of its productivity suite to early adopters that helped test-drive the release, a participant in the Office 2010 Beta program has told Softpedia. It appears that the Redmond company has found an excellent way to reward Beta testers that got involved in providing feedback for Office 2010 throughout the Beta and the Release Candidate (RC) stages. Certainly, the move is bound to make Beta testers that provided their input to Microsoft when Office 2010 was still in development very happy.

“Thank you again for being an active participant in our Office 2010 Technical Beta program. As a small token of appreciation, we’d like to give you a complimentary copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2010. Microsoft Office Professional 2010 includes these great applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access,” an excerpt from the email the Office 2010 Technical Beta program team sent to customers reads. 

“We are providing a product key and downloadable software only. No physical media is provided,” the company reveals in the message that also contains a Product Key designed to activate the Office Professional 2010 product. According to the Microsoft Store, a copy of Office Professional 2010 costs $499.99 “Office 2010 is publically available today! Everyone on the Office engineering team is very excited about this milestone. We’ve had more of you download and try our Beta than ever before (more than 9,000,000 downloads), and business users have been starting to use Office 2010 since our Business Launch,” a member of the Office 2010 Engineering team noted on July 15th. 

Now, it’s clear to me that not all nine million testers of Office 2010 Beta will be getting a free copy of the productivity suite. The particular early adopter that provided the details included above was a participant in the Office 2010 Beta program on Microsoft Connect, and not just a generic Beta tester. In this regard, Microsoft seems to be favoring testers that actually reported bugs in Office 2010 as the productivity suite evolved to RTM. 

Office Home and Business 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Home and Student 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.

Office Professional 2010 RTM Build 14.0.4760.1000 is available for download here.