Eligible are families, students and small businesses that own 5 PCs or less from the United States. Each selected participant will receive a preview copy of Microsoft Office 2010, access to web versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint plus dedicated support by a program manager and various other sources.

Participants specifically get:

• Microsoft Office 2010 pre-installed on a “loaner” laptop PC – before it ships!
• 24-hour unlimited e-mail support Monday – Friday, with phone support for escalations
• Monthly webcast training and Q&A sessions
• Community site access, so you can connect with other participants and easily use resources like feature videos and announcements
• FREE copy of Microsoft Office 2010 (when available)

This does come at a price. The loaner laptop and Microsoft Office 2010 have to be used on a daily basis and Microsoft expects participants to take part in surveys, trainings and calls with the chance to be invited to share the story on an even broader level by being featured in case studies and videos.

The Microsoft Office 2010 Real Life Stories program is available to US citizens only at this point in time. They can submit an application at the official website until June 30.

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The main problem that arises when using the Word HTML rendering engine is that Microsoft Outlook 2010 will not support web standards like CSS or background images. This could very well mean that Outlook 2010 users will be stuck with broken HTML emails for the next years after the release. Below is an image that is showing a HTML email in both Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2010:

Microsoft Outlook 2000 was using the Internet Explorer rendering engine to display HTML emails. Microsoft mentions benefits that Outlook users gain by using Microsoft Word as their email authoring tool which include automatic styles and templates and SmartArt among other benefits. It would also not be in the best interest performance wise to use a different rendering engine for the display of HTML emails. (via Email Standards)

The initiators of the Fix Outlook protest website are making use of Twitter to rally protesters from all over the world. Every Twitter user that mentions fixoutlook.org in their tweets will automatically partake in the protest. The avatar icons of users will be displayed on the Fix Outlook website. Currently more than 15500 users have already joined the protest.

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