REDMOND, Wash. — May 12, 2010 — Today business customers can dive into the next generation of productivity: Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Those who want a demonstration of what the new software can do have a unique venue via today’s virtual kickoff.

To help celebrate the availability of the new products, Microsoft is throwing its largest ever simultaneous worldwide launch. In addition to on-site activities at dozens of the company’s subsidiaries, the launch will be accessible live and on-demand through a new virtual launch platform built on SharePoint 2010. The company expects more than half a million people worldwide to participate via the launch website, says Carol Matthews, a senior digital marketing manager for Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Group.

“It is an extremely important milestone for these products, and today’s launch will help amplify the moment and get as many people as possible participating and talking about them,” says Matthews, who headed the cross-group team that built the virtual event and its content. “Without SharePoint 2010, we couldn’t have afforded to do this launch at this scale.”

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The SharePoint Server 2010 Beta software is available in the following languages:

Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish

There are two versions of SharePoint Server 2010 Beta:

SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Client Access License features)
For organizations looking to expand their business collaboration platform to enable advanced scenarios. Use the Enterprise capabilities of SharePoint to fully interoperate with external line-of-business applications, web services, and Microsoft Office client applications; make better decisions with rich data visualization, dashboards, and advanced analytics; and build robust forms and workflow-based solutions.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise
For organizations looking to create customer-facing public internet sites and private extranets using the full enterprise capabilities of SharePoint. This provides full SharePoint Enterprise functionality and no other technical limits.

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