Impressive... Minutes after I saw the first post coming out on Newsgator about the Microsoft Office 12 Beta being available I got my welcome e-mail to the beta group!

Great stuff. Managed to get into the (apparently) very restricted beta group. The download was a little bit more complicated though. The beta site was plagued with slow speeds. I guess the number of people downloading the applications exceeded anyone's expectations.

I eman, it's only 10,000 people, but these days it is only a matter of minutes before a release and everyone involved knows about it. So I guess we had 9,999 people downloading the software - except me!

After a few hours (yes, an I am on 10Mbps connection here) I managed to get the software. But I don't have the key to install it yet: to reduce the overload, some people didn't have access to the site after a certain time, including myself.

So I was told this access will be restore soon, when the download frenzy finishes.

In the meantime I've got an e-mail from Microsoft about the expected NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreemen). The entire Microsoft Office Beta 12 is under NDA, but some were accepted in a reviewers group, with some approval for public comments. Lucky I am in this even smaller group. I can post about some products (the core), but not about other products part of the beta (which I can't even disclose here).

So expect a few blog entries with comments on Microsoft Office 12 Beta coming soon, with more juicy information.

Update: All downloads going again, and I had the key - it was in the original welcome email. So impatient I was that I went directly to the Beta download centre and didn't read the rest of the email!