itaysk

Yesterday Microsoft has officially addressed the next wave of Office System products.
As there isn’t much information yet, This post is just my opinions and takeaway from the announcements.

The original announcements:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx
• http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-15Office2010.mspx

The Name

The fist thing that pops into sight is the name of the product.
Looks like Microsoft isn’t quit decisive about how to position SharePoint Server among it’s product lines.
We started with SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). Than, SharePoint was welcomed to the Office family, and therefore was rebranded as Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). And now we are settling for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Microsoft no longer wants the Office as a client apps suite to be associated with SharePoint.
By the way, WSS stays for WSS 4.0.

Features

Don’t expect to see a list of new features.. Those are secretly kept at an early stage like this. Still, here is a list of general subjects, that was mentioned in the announcements.

The next version of SharePoint will:

• Have better support for browsers and mobile phones.
• Present a different (better?) licensing model.
• Have improved management options for administrators.
• Support industry standards.
• Have open APIs (what does that means?)
• Provide better tools for developers.

Support for Industry  Standards (HTML wise), and have better support for browsers

SharePoint 2007 isn’t quite aware of accessibility or browser support. the master page, the web parts, the whole deal was very sluggish. This is very bad considering MOSS is being sold as an internet facing web sites platform (CMS and publishing features) and as such it must be very standards aware.
AKS (Accessibility Kit for SharePoint) does put you in the right direction, but requires a lot of work. As IE8 is released with full compliance for industry standards it’s inevitable SharePoint will have to align also.

Support for mobile phones

We see this trend everywhere now. Mobile devices are taken more seriously these days. We already know that Office Web Applications supports mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone. I hope to see the same with SharePoint.

Better Documentations

It’s about time.. You see, SharePoint is a development platform, and as such it has to have not only good, but great documentation. In reality the SharePoint SDK on it’s own is not sufficient for learning the technology, and only thanks to bloggers, the community, and some reverse engineering, the darker sides of the products are unveiled. In fact some areas of the product are not documented at all even today.
I’m glad to hear that this issue is being considered.

Office Live Applications Integration

We already know that Office Live Applications will integrate into SharePoint 2010. What I expect it the same type of integration made with Excel Services in MOSS2007, but now with support for editing, and more file formats.

Different deployment options

The announcements further emphasizes that companies can choose between deploying SharePoint on-premises or hosted as a service. This aligns with what we already know about SharePoint in Azure.

TimeLine

SharePoint 2010 will enter a technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010.

That’s about it.. I expect some more leaking of information as we will enter technical preview.

--My name is Itay Shakury, and I’m a SharePoint Consultant --