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Nov 18 09

Public betas of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 released

Today at the PDC in Los Angeles Kurt DelBene has announced the release of the public betas of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010.
The betas can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/ZC2010 and include:

  • SharePoint Server 2010
  • Office 2010
  • Visio 2010
  • Project 2010
  • Office Mobile 2010
  • Office Web Applications

There are two things that are new to these releases (apart from a s**t-load of fixes compared to Technical Preview versions).

  • The Outlook Social Connector feeds information about people directly into Outlook. Integration with SharePoint 2010 is out-of-the-box, user profile information, a contact’s photo and information from the My Site of the author is shown when an email is selected. The social connector also comes with an SDK allowing developers to build connectors with third party social networks. The LinkedIn connector (build by LinkedIn) is expected to be released early next year.
  • Office Mobile 2010 public beta is part of the Microsoft campaign to deliver a great user experience of Microsoft products across the PC, phone and  browser and offers a version of Office optimized for use on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

 

Personally I’m most interested in the SharePoint 2010 beta. If you are too, make sure you read these guidelines by Jie Li before you start installing!
The most important fact in there is that, at the moment, SharePoint 2010 doesn’t work on Windows Server 2008 R2 without a hotfix. Unfortunately the hotfix hasn’t been released yet, and without it the SharePoint Service Applications won’t work. This means that for the moment, you have to choose between waiting for the hotfix to become available and installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008 SP2 for now.

Having said that, there are plenty of reasons to install SharePoint 2010 and start playing around with it.
Some of the coolest features are:

  • Document sets
  • Enterprise wide metadata
  • Lots of new search features (even without the FAST integration)
  • Great new development tools in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint 2010 (and I do mean great!)
  • Social networking with, among other things, tagging, rating and improved people search
  • Off-loading blob storage using SQL Server Remote Blob Storage (RBS)
  • New client object models
  • Business Connectivity Services, this is the old 2007 Business Data Catalog, that has had a major makeover and that is improved hugely

And many other cool new features…

Have fun!