Monday's Office 2010 preview leaks to BitTorrent

Computerworld - Just hours before Microsoft plans to launch Office 2010, a build that may be the first public preview of the suite leaked to the Internet, searches showed late Sunday.

A new version of Office 2010, build 14.0.4302.1000, appeared on several BitTorrent tracking sites Sunday, including Mininova.org. Both the 32- and 64-bit editions leaked to file-sharing sites.

As of midnight ET, the 32-bit version showed about 30 "seeders" -- the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- and about 400 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. Approximately 1,200 copies of the file had been downloaded.

Office 2010 has leaked before. In May, a week after Microsoft announced that it would issue the Technical Preview this summer, an early edition showed up on BitTorrent.

According to multiple reports last week, Microsoft will kick off its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) Monday morning by announcing it's ready to distribute Office 2010's invite-only preview, and by demonstrating Office Web -- lightweight, online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

Although Microsoft said that the Office 2010 Technical Preview will be issued to hundreds of thousands of users, it's an invitation-only prelude to a wider public beta that the company will run later this year. Microsoft has not announced a date for the beta, but expects to provide millions of copies of the suite.

Office 2010 is slated to ship sometime during the first half of next year.

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