The 2010 version of Office Home and Business by Microsoft had just been launched the past weekend. The company is now busy sending out previews online thanks to the new technology of streaming download. This beta preview is just the second time that the company made one of their products readily available to the eagerly awaiting public. This also followed the test edition of the Office Professional Plus 2010 (which is enterprise-grade) that was showed the previous week.

Such a move by Microsoft came a mere three days right after invitations were sent to a small collective of individuals to let them test out the new Microsoft Home and Business. This preview will provide the public the opportunity to try out for themselves one in three editions which Microsoft intends to sell at retail. It includes the following programs: Outlook, Work, OneNote, Excel and PowerPoint. At the moment, the company has not given the prices for their 2010 version of Office – neither have they released an expected ship date. The most they revealed was that they will release it sometime in the first half of the following year.

The Home and Business versions are part of the first beta which Microsoft intends to deliver through the Click-to-Run structure of theirs. Here, you can stream various pieces of their suite as soon as users start their download so that they can already get into the program within mere minutes. A lot of users will be starting out with the trial version, and the rest of the code will keep downloading right in the back. The Home and Business is also part of a new virtualized environment which will keep it separate from Windows since the applications will run from the virtual drive called "Q".

While the Click-to-Run lets a person run the beta without any disturbances (save for Outlook), there are also some problems which the company readily acknowledges. These were all identified in the actual blog site of the Microsoft Office team, which is also run and maintained by the same people. Last November 6, it was found out that some add-ons of Office are not compatible with Click-to-Run. It may also end up having trouble identifying the Click-to-Run products on tour computer, or it can be that communication is a problem when it runs in its virtual environment.

The Click-to-Run products such as Home and Office likewise steer clear of the usual patching process of Microsoft. This is the usual practice that most users of Microsoft Office products have gotten used to in the past. Instead, this time they mentioned that they will now have automatic updates without any need for user approval. It does everything by itself in a highly automatic manner without need for permissions. The users of Click-to-Run will get their updates over time without the need to download and later on install such patches. This is what the Microsoft Office team announced in their blog post. The product will seamlessly update itself right into the background.

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