Invitations for Office 12 Beta 1 have gone out to technical testers, according to the folks over on ActiveWin.com. "The Office '12' Technical Beta is currently scheduled to begin in the late Fall/early Winter timeframe," the invites say. We've been hearing for a while now that late November is the target for the Beta 1 drop. Meanwhile, we've noticed a slow but steady uptick in the number of Office team members who've started blogging. And they're even talking about an as-yet-unavailable product: Office 12. Example: Jensen Harris explains which Office 12 apps will get the new user interface and why.