Thursday September 14 at 9 a.m. PST. That's when Microsoft is set to post the last public test build of its next-generation Office suite -  for both client and server systems - will be free to Beta 2 customers. Customers will need to install the update as a patch over Office 2007 Beta 2. eWEEK Labs tested the refresh on a Lenovo ThinkPad T41 running Microsoft's Windows Vista Release Candidate 1, with a 1.5GHz Intel Pentium M 758 processor and 1.5GB of RAM. We also installed the office suite update on a Hewlett-Packard xw9300 workstation with dual 2.6GHz Advanced Micro Devices Opteron 252 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. Here's an excerpt:

The update focuses mainly on user interface and performance enhancements. For example, users who are tired of Office 2007's two color schemes—black and default blue-will applaud the suite's new silver theme, accessible regardless of the operating system used. And, while we've found some Office 2007 applications, including Outlook, to be sluggish, the performance improvements in the refresh were obvious.

We especially liked a couple of enhancements that have been made to Office's new ribbon interface. It's now easier to minimize the Office ribbon to provide more document real estate: Users need only right-click anywhere on the ribbon and choose "minimize the ribbon" to work on their documents without all of the ribbon's tools; a second right-click brings the ribbon back. The ribbon has also been enhanced with the addition of menu tabs, which let us bring back a minimized ribbon by left-clicking on a tab. We could then reminimize the ribbon with a second left-click.