Today Microsoft made the Office 2010 beta available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. So tonight I downloaded and installed it. I first attempted to do an upgrade into my existing Office 2010 Technical Preview but the beta didn’t like that very much at all. I had to uninstall the TP before I could attempt the beta install. Then the install of the beta version went well. I was very happily surprised when I brought up Outlook and it remembered my CRM Client for Outlook installation and configuration. I didn’t even have to run the Configuration Wizard. I did install the 32-bit version of Office 2010 since CRM does not yet support 64-bit clients. (Did UR7 change this??)
When using the CRM Client for Office Outlook you will not see the familiar CRM toolbar when you first launch Outlook. To find the CRM functionality, click on the Add-Ins tab at the top of the Outlook window.
I have not had an opportunity to try CRM with any of the other Office programs like Excel and Word. I did notice some issues associated with CRM not recognizing the version of Word when running the Technical Preview. I’ll see what happens with the new beta. I may even ‘play with it a bit’ if it doesn’t cooperate at first. I’ll let you know how it goes.