SharePoint and Office 2010 to Launch on May 12th

On Friday, Arpan Shah announced the official debut date for Microsoft Office 2010 and, of course SharePoint 2010, on the Microsoft SharePoint Blog. In the same post, he mentioned that the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) will come a few weeks earlier, some time in April.

There are a lot of changes coming in the new versions, so there is also lots of planning to do. I know many of you are planning to move forward aggressively, while many of you will also be on older versions of SharePoint long into the future. Whichever path you choose, it might be helpful to keep the following in mind:

• Your current stuff will still work, even once the new software comes out. You don't "need" to upgrade immediately.
• SharePoint Server 2010 requires Windows Server 2008. It also requires that your entire stack, including both Windows Server and SQL Server, be 64-bit.
• Although you will always get the best results when keeping both the Office client and SharePoint versions in sync, you will still get reasonable functionality with staged upgrades. (Look for information about just how the different version combinations interact soon.)
• One exception to the previous statement is SharePoint Designer. SharePoint Designer 2007 will not work for SharePoint 2010 sites. Conversely, SharePoint Designer 2010 will not work with anything except SharePoint 2010 sites.
• On the Office client side, even if you are using 64-bit Windows, you can still use the 32-bit Office. This is critical, because you cannot mix and match 32 and 64 bit versions of Office on the same system. Naturally, you can't use 64-bit Office on 32-bit Windows in any case.
• No matter what version of SharePoint you are on, a failure to plan is a plan to fail. Think about how you want to use SharePoint in your company before you deploy it.

This is going to be an exciting Spring in the SharePoint world, and I can't wait to help you make sense of it!