Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 On Its Way

Microsoft announced that a beta version of SharePoint Server 2010 would go out to a select few in July by an invitation-only scenario.

Microsoft will launch an invitation-only SharePoint Server 2010 beta test in July with a select group of customers and then follow the program up with a public testing phase ahead of the Office 2010 release in the first half of next year. The SharePoint 2010 beta/technology preview will be invitation-only and will focus on a number of its enterprise customers and target specific enterprise deployment scenarios.

Out of all the Office 2010 products, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 will be tweaked the most, says insiders. Exactly what will be changing in SharePoint — Microsoft's integrated suite of six back-end servers that handle search, content management, collaboration, etc. — with the next release is still somewhat still unclear. Here are a few things that are said to have changes: Microsoft has confirmed officially the renaming and is saying that SharePoint Workspace Manager and OneNote will be part of the Office 2010 ProPlus SKU; SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only and require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 to run. It also will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005; and SharePoint Server 2010 won't support Internet Explorer 6, according to the SharePoint Team blog, which states, “SharePoint 2010 will be “targeting standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems. In addition we're planning on an increased level of compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows Operating Systems.”

SharePoint 2010 is also said to have a “Web-enabled Ribbon control” and support greater use of Silverlight controls. There's also a new feature, known as “faceted search” coming in the 2010 SharePoint release, but no details are available yet on exactly what it entails. A new version of FAST Search for SharePoint will be made available at a lower cost as well.

Tom Rizzo, director of Microsoft SharePoint Server said at the annual TechEd conference earlier this month that the “invitation only” scenario is the best way to gather feedback on SharePoint, which has become the fastest growing product ever released by Microsoft. The company also plans to run a similar beta program for Project Server 2010.

The Microsoft Office 2010 beta is begin run as a separate beta, or what Microsoft calls a technology preview, that is being opened up to TechEd attendees and select others. The Office 2010 beta will focus on client technologies: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, InfoPath and Publisher.

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