Serge Luca (Sharepoint MVP)

Unless you lived in a cave for the last 48 hours, you probably know that Microsoft announced 2 days ago the general availability of the public beta of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps .

Due to several months of NDA with Microsoft, I haven't be able to talk about Sharepoint 2010, but I've been using the Sharepoint 2010 Technical Preview (beta 1) for months:

• I'm currently creating a 5 days Sharepoint course that will be available at Devoteam in a few weeks,
  I'm actually updating the course to the beta 2 and the new version will be tested next week. I will be the main trainer.
• I’ve also been fortunate to work with Devoteam on a Sharepoint 2010 pilot project in Belgium.
• Last month (with 7399 other attendees much more than Tech-Ed!), I attended the first public presentation of Sharepoint 2010 at Vegas.

What’s next ?

• You can download the Sharepoint 2010 beta 2 here.
• Software & hardware requirements here.
• You will get an overview of Sharepoint 2010 in this post.
• For developers, go the Sharepoint developer center.
• For IT pro, go the TechNet.
• If you have a problem, a question, or if you want to learn from other people, go to the Sharepoint 2010 newsgroups.
• You will find a list of webcast in Mike Walsh web site.

Installing Sharepoint 2010

you can install Sharepoint 2010 on Windows 7 (yes), Windows 2008, Windows 2008R2 all 64 bits.
I did it on all platforms. I recommend of Virtual environment like HyperV, VMWare or the free Sun Virtual Box (which is the one I'm currently running and very happy wit it). Forget VirtualPC, it cannnot run 64 bits OS.

On Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, make sure the following hotfix is installed, that is super important.

If you want to install Sharepoint 2010 on Windows 7, please read this post it’s the most important !!!!!

Also read this post .

For developers, Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 (sure!)

yes, now Sharepoint 2010 is a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010 b2, you can get it here. You will notice that Sharepoint 2010 is based on the .Net framework 3.5 and not on .Net 4.0; you won’t be able to use WF 4 in SP2010, but hey, you can design your workflow in Visio, you won’t miss the new WF 4 Designer.

I will start a series of posts that will describe the new platform, but to summarize:

• there are MUCH more out of the box features in Sharepoint, and this was a problem with WSS3/MOSS2007: it took a few months to companies/customers to realize that they need a developer to customize the platform. Sharepoint 2010 is now a great ECM platform->power to the people/managers…
• on the architecture point of View, the main modification is the Service Application Model : no more Shared Service providers and each web application can use any Service and the same service can be used by several web applications in a many to many way; Custom Service Applications can be created->Extensible.
• off course the Developer and the IT Pro experience has been improved, but again I will describe it in other posts/videos.
• I still have to mention that the integration with external data (like external database) has been improved: external data can show up as sharepoint lists thanks to a new kind of content type : External Content Type (we can also modify external data, more details later); and this is available in the free version of Sharepoint 2010 : Microsoft Sharepoint Foundation 2010. No more BDC, but “just” a new service, the Business Connectivity Service; as a Microsoftie used to say, “there was an opportunity for improvement”.

I’ve been Connected System MVP during several years; I’m very glad to be awarded Sharepoint MVP by Microsoft !

…or don't detach your content db.

In server farms that have a large number of sites, installing a software update with the content databases attached can result in too much downtime. To minimize downtime, Microsoft recommends that you perform the additional step of detaching the content databases.
But this time, don't do that for the last August cumulative update.

More details here http://blogs.technet.com/stefan_gossner/

The problem is being investigated

The Sharepoint Pattern & Practice group recently released the August version of Sharepoint Guidance and it’s worth reading!

A common question in the sharepoint newsgroups is “shoud I use a Sharepoint list or the database ?”.