That’s what makes the immanent release of a new Office suite, Microsoft Office 2010, big news. As of last week (May 15) Microsoft indicated that the latest version of MS Office will be available for retail purchase online and in stores on June 15. Various 32- and 64-bit RTM versions of Office 2010 have been available on MSDN for a while now, with the latest batch uploaded on May 10, 2010.

But with the official release date of Office 2010 still almost a month in the offing, interested IT professionals may want to hop over to the Microsoft Office 2010 pages, where they can still grab a 60-day trial copy of the beta version of the Professional Plus edition. Note that you must remove prior Office versions before you can install the RTM version on a test machine, and that MS recommends against installing this beta package “on a PC that will require an activated copy of Office after the 60-day trial period is over.” Nevertheless, it’s a great way to prep for the coming onslaught, and to get familiar with what is bound to become a fixture in many enterprise IT operations over the next year or two.