After having released a technical preview of its next-year-scheduled Office 2010 application suite to a limited audience in July, Microsoft has now announced the release of the public beta of the forthcoming suite to a much broader range of testers.

Noting that Office 2010 has been undergoing internal testing, Jacob Jaffe, chief of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Group, said that the public beta will "scale to millions of people and get to a broader range of users."

In addition, the company has also introduced a new way in which the testers can try the beta without the fear that it would have any adverse impact on the other software installed on their computers. It further revealed that Office 2010 will be available in only five SKUs, namely - Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional, Standard, and Professional Plus.

With Microsoft Office being the standard for productivity applications for a majority of modern enterprises, the beta of the Office 2010 includes some notable new features, including the capability of editing videos; broadcasting presentations in PowerPoint; improved charting in Excel; and an efficient Navigation Pane in Word.

Since Office 2010 is expected to be, by far, the most forceful office suite on the market, Microsoft has also embarked on an experiment with online features and sharing, with the addition of Office 2010 Web Apps to the upcoming package.