CA is offering users of Microsoft’s Windows Vista Beta 2 operating system a free, one-year trial subscription of its consumer eTrust EZ Antivirus program. Microsoft estimates around two million users will use Beta 2 of Vista.

The one-year CA trial includes business-grade anti-virus protection, daily virus updates and unlimited 24-hour web support, said CA. See here

David Luft, CA senior vice president of product development, said, “We have been busy readying our security software products to support the Windows Vista platform.”

There’s going to be some new refreshments to the Microsoft Office user interface and here’s a good video to watch if you are keen to know what’s going to be done.

In previous releases of Microsoft Office applications, people used a system of menus, toolbars, task panes, and dialog boxes to get their work done. This system worked well when the applications had a limited number of commands. Now that the programs do so much more, the menus and toolbars system does not work as well. Too many program features are too hard for many users to find. For this reason, the overriding design goal for the new user interface is to make it easier for people to find and use the full range of features these applications provide. In addition, we wanted to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so they can spend more time and energy focused on their work. With these goals in mind, we developed a results-oriented approach that makes it much easier to produce great results using the 2007 Microsoft Office applications.

I was looking at VistaOffice’s stats today and I got a nice shock when I saw this site featured on the Microsoft Office Beta Community Site. Wow. What an honour. I even spotted a b5media blog on it too (office12watch.com)

Sweet, I’m gonna have a nice lunch today to celebrate this revelation !

If you’ve been following Vista or trying out the beta releases, you’ll be excited to know that Microsoft has now release Windows Vista Beta 2 (Build 5384), and release the next Office beta – Beta 2 of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional (440MB) alongside it yesterday. Anyone that has a MSDN or TechNet subscription can download them, so if you work in an IT firm with a Microsoft partnership you can download it for free straight from MS.

If you don’t have a subscription, all you’re able to snag is the Vista CPP, which still may be worth reading. Some of the changes including task manager functions for regular users that keeps them within the scope of their own processes, various fixes for over 100 programs that had bugs or flaws with Vista, and other integration issues. If you’re planning on rolling Vista out, it’s always good to keep up on changes, so get it soon.

More Beta 2 features :

-New version of the Solitare game
-Better looking Start menu in a Tree structure.
-Better startup sound and alert chimes.
-Search box on every Explorer window

Vista Beta 2 and Office beta Release source