The future of business productivity is here with the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 global launch on May 12 at 11 a.m. EDT.

• Groove (the offline/online synchronization tool Microsoft bought when it acquired Groove Networks) is being renamed and repositioned with the upcoming release as “SharePoint Workspace Manager.” Update on May 13: Microsoft has confirmed officially the renaming and is saying that SharePoint Workspace Manager and OneNote will be part of the Office 2010 ProPlus SKU. (Microsoft is declining to provide any other information, at this point, on its planned Office 2010 line-up.)

• 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.

• SharePoint Server 2010 won’t support Internet Explorer 6. From the SharePoint Team blog: 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,” according to the SharePoint Team Blog.

• SharePoint 2010 will feature a “Web-enabled Ribbon control” and support greater use of Silverlight controls

• CMIS support will allow interoperability between SharePoint 2010 and other content management systems

• The architecture supposedly won’t change as it did between SharePoint Server 2003 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, thus insuring less compatibility issues and a smoother upgrade path (at least in theory)
• There’s a new feature, known as “faceted search” coming in the 2010 SharePoint release. No details available yet.

• A new version of FAST Search for SharePoint will be made available at a lower cost. Meanwhile, according to contractor and SharePoint blogger Lars Fastrup (whose blog entry is the source of a lot of this post), “the SharePoint team have scrapped their efforts to make the SharePoint search engine scale beyond 50 million documents in a single index. The argument will be to move to the FAST search engine instead.”

Source: www.zdnet.com

“I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes,” says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. “The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now, and people are talking about it as a middleware decision,” Gotta says.

MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company’s history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, ECM (enterprise content management), business process management, and business intelligence.

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a “perfect storm,” observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology, and integration around Microsoft’s Office suite.

The attention is a wake up call for competitors, especially IBM/Lotus, as SharePoint could pull customers to other Microsoft software because it is closely integrated with Microsoft’s unified communications stack, its e-mail server, Office, and Office applications, including back-end file sharing repositories for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped-down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test-drive the software, and soon, end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.

In 2008, SharePoint has evolved into the prototypical Microsoft tool — good enough for SMBs, adaptable to large enterprises, and, most important, plenty of financial opportunities for third-party independent software vendors and systems integrators.

Partners involved in everything from directory management to archiving to single sign-on are reporting that SharePoint is improving their own revenue.

In March, Bill Gates said SharePoint had passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and had eclipsed $1 billion in sales for his company.

Many critics dispute the licensing number but not the message that SharePoint is on fire.

SharePoint, however, isn’t without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.

Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint’s portal capabilities still don’t measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.

“I think there is going to be some buyer’s remorse,” Gotta says.

SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.

The social-networking tools are uninspiring, and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.

Source: Infoworld