Microsoft makes most of its profits off the back of two of its most popular products -- the Windows operating system and Office productivity suite. These are two of Microsoft's most important products, and both of them are due for replacement very soon.

Windows 7 will launch later this year and Office 2010 will reportedly launch next year. Office 2010 promises some much needed tweaks to how the individual portions of the suite performance. Exchange 2010 is said to have received particular attention from the developers. One of the key new features of the email software is a personal email archive among other things.

Office 2010 will add Outlook 2010 to Firefox and Safari browsers, two of the main competitors to Microsoft's IE browser. The new additions to the email application are only a few tweaks that are expected from Office 2010.

Office users wanting to get hands on Office 2010 as soon as possible can now sign up for the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview. The preview requires registration and registering doesn’t guarantee you access to Office 2010 early. All registrants will be waitlisted for consideration for the program and those invited to participate in the program will be notified in mid-July.

Those accepted into the program will get to check out early versions of Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Communicator 2010, Access 2010, InfoPath 2010, and Publisher 2010. TechEd attendees will get the pre-release versions of the applications as well.