Microsoft is releasing for download the first public beta build of Exchange 2010 (the product formerly known as Exchange 14) on April 15. But the rest of the Office 2010 suite isn’t going out to testers until the third quarter of 2009, Microsoft officials said this week.

Separately, ArsTechnica has a screen shot of the Win 7 RC download page. As Ars notes, the RC download period is set to last through June 2009 and the RC set to expire in June 2010. Ars also grabbed a shot of the expected hardware requirements for the Windows 7 RC:

Windows 7 hasn’t even hit the Release Candidate test phase, but already analysts at Gartner are advising business users they shouldn’t plan to wait for Service Pack 1 (SP1) to arrive before planning deployments.

Last but not least don't forget that Microsoft is ending mainstream (free) support for Windows XP Home and Professional, as well as for its Office 2003 suite, on April 14, 2009. It also is “retiring” Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), meaning it will no longer provide support for that four-year-old release.

I only wish I had the alpha bits of SharePoint 2010, OCS 2010, Project Server 2010, and of course Visual Studio 2010… Can anyone help a brother out???? Please….

Cheers,

-Ivan