Since a technical preview version of Office 2010 leaked barely a day ago it seems to have spread to anyone and everyone, despite a limited official technical preview scheduled for July. We already knew that Office 2010 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (and the technical preview was leaked in both these flavours) and earlier this week it was confirmed that it will run on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well.
Robert McLaws is one of the many who has downloaded and installed the leaked build on Windows 7, and has discovered that parts of the Office suite have been optimised for Windows 7 by utilising the new jump lists feature. Here you can see Outlook 2010 taking advantage of it by using a jump list to provide a list of useful tasks.
[Image source: Robert McLaws]
The jump list will surely come in handy by providing quick links to Outlook"s four main functions - your email, calendar, contacts and tasks - and to create a new message or entry for each of these tools. By dragging a file from the jump list of another application onto the navigation pane in Outlook it automatically opens the compose email window with that file as an attachment. The taskbar icon for Outlook also shows you when you have have a new email message as you can see in this image, taken recently at the TechEd 2009 keynote.
[Image source: TechRadar]
From what we can tell, the jump lists of other programs in the Office 2010 will offer the usual list of recent and pinned files. If you are tempted to try out the leaked Office 2010 Technical Preview version then be aware: we"ve been tipped off that the build won"t run as well as it should as it is still an earlier version of the code that will be used in the official Technical Preview which should be available in July.