This morning we officially released the Beta for SharePoint 2010 (although MSDN and TechNet subscribers have access for a few days) and Office 2010.

What’s new in SharePoint 2010?  A few weeks ago I sat down with Chris Johnson from the SharePoint team and recorded a podcast that explores some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 – have a listen to see what is new.

In Office 2010, there are also a bunch of new features, but here are just a few worth watching out for:

1. Revamped Outlook client – full ribbon support, and a heap of new features including user experience, one click mail management, ignore entire conversation threads, inline voice mail and voicemail to text previews
2. Excel Business intelligence – pull massive amounts of data into Excel and mix it up with other data sources – Trade Me (for example) are looking to use this to analyze every trade ever done on Trade Me – with a standard desktop machine and Excel.
3. Collaboration – this is a sleeper.  Multiple people can now work on the same document/sheet/etc at the same time in different locations.
4. SharePoint Workspace – take SharePoint sites offline and sync them automatically – very cool

Look for more on Office 2010 in next week’s podcast.

For the moment, go and get the bits from the links below:

• Office 2010 Beta
• SharePoint 2010 Beta

In addition to SharePoint and Office, we have also shipped a bunch of other goodies too:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP
• SQL Server 2008 R2 - PowerPivot for Excel 2010 November CTP
• Exchange 2010 RTM Trial
• Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM Trail
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
• Silverlight 4
• Forefront Security

Plenty to tinker with if you have the time and inclination – get into it!