As a part of groundwork move for the final launch of Microsoft's next version of the Office suite in the first half of next year, the company Tuesday announced having begun extensive testing of the product. Code-named Office 14, the product will be expectedly dubbed Office 2010, with all its allied gears to also come with the 2010 mark.      While some of the earliest testing of Office 14 was undertaken by the company in 2008 called for a technology preview, with a beta to follow this year; the details of the recent not-so-pushy schedule have not been divulged.

Updating Betanews about the ongoing proceedings, Microsoft said that the first technical previews of the applications suite will be circulated among a limited number of special participants in 2009 third quarter.

Head of the Exchange team, Office executive Rajesh Jha, said in an interview that technology previews are more restricted than public betas which go to countless people and "much more closely resembles a final release."

Jha added that the technology preview will not only include the conventional desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, but also the browser-based "Office Web Apps" under construction by Microsoft. Moreover, along with the Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser-based applications will run in Safari and Firefox, thereby taking Office onto both Linux computers and the iPhone!