Microsoft Office 2010 Release Candidate Available for Download to Connect Users

[riso]

Recently we had reported about Office 2010 reached to RTM stage and should be available to Microsoft partners on or after 15th February. Until today Office 2010 Beta was only available for Microsoft connect and MSDN users for testing purpose also Microsoft has made available Office 2010 for public download.

From today Microsoft has started sending invitation for Office 2010 Release Candidate. The build number of Office 2010 RC is 14.0.4734.1000 which similar to what Wzor has reported as Office 2010 RTM Escrow build.
Along with Office 2010 Professional Plus RC invitation connect users also getting invitations to test Office 2010 Server with retail product keys.

As usual there is no upgrade path from previous versions of Office or the Office 2010 Beta build to the Release Candidate of Office 2010. You must uninstall all previous versions (including Office 2007 and the Office 2010 Beta build) before beginning the installation of Office 2010 Release Candidate client and server products.

There is no news whether Microsoft will make Office 2010 Release Candidate for public download or not but if you look at Windows 7 RC example we might see Office 2010 RC public preview soon.

It’s matter of time for Office 2010 RC to leak on torrents, so any guess how long will it take to leak??

[Jeffrey]

Re: "As usual there is no upgrade path from previous versions of Office or the Office 2010 Beta build to the Release Candidate of Office 2010.  You must uninstall all previous versions (including Office 2007 and the Office 2010 Beta build) before beginning the installation of Office 2010 Release Candidate client and server products."

I'm a little confused.  I was able to download and install Office 2010 Beta (current version:  14.0.4514.1004) and have it co-exist beside Office 2007 and Office 2003 (with the exception of Outlook 2010 which I did not install).  This is as has been the case in the past where you can install multiple versions as long as they are done sequentially (Outlook is the exception as you can only have one version installed). Are you saying that the Release Candidate version of Office 2010 won't allow this?

Jeff

Note from Admin.  probably it let you install... but according to Microsoft it's not possible.

When there are Members who have done the job correctly post it here,
Tnx

[Samtastic]

How about if someone from Connect downloads it and uploads it to torrents?

[Snuffy]

The release is all over Torrents. It simply will do you NO GOOD to DownLoad, unless you have a KEY..
Any body have a KEY they want to SHARE?
I'm sure there are none, since the KEYs are TRACABLE.