SharePoint 2010 Hyper-V Virtual Machines Available

Microsoft has announced that pre-configured machines with Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 are now available for download.

There are two machines:

  • SharePoint 2010/SQL Server 2008/Visual Studio 2010/Office 2010 VM
  • Exchange 2010 VM

joined in the same “contoso.com” domain.

8 GB of RAM are recommended for running the machines.

The download page for the virtual machines is available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en

SharePoint 2010 Certifications Announced

Certification Path for Developers

  • 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led course designed for developers with six months or more of .NET development experience. Course covers what you need to know to be an effective member of a SharePoint development team using Visual Studio 2010.

  • 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led training course designed for development team leads who have already passed the Developing on SharePoint 2010 technical specialist exam. The course covers choosing technologies for and scoping a SharePoint project, best practices for SharePoint development, configuring a SharePoint development environment, advanced use of SharePoint developer features, and debugging of code in a SharePoint project.

Certification Path for IT professionals

  • 70-667 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover configuration of SharePoint 2010 including deployment, upgrade, management, and operation on a server farm.

  • 70-668 PRO: SharePoint 2010, Administrator
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover advanced SharePoint 2010 topics including capacity planning, topology designing, and performance tuning.

Source: Microsoft Partners web site (https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40121316)

How Did The Prediction End on SP2010?

More than a year ago, I wrote a summary post about the rumours and buzz around the next version of SharePoint (SP2010). My post has seen a lot of translations and links to it from different blogs. Now I’d like to revisit it and check what has been correctly predicted and what has not.

Let’s see how do I stand as a crystal-ball reader.

Feature Outcome
The SharePoint v14 / 2009 will be shipped only as x64 installation Included in SP2010

Silverlight 2.0 webparts or UI will be present.

Included in SP2010
SQL tables-like behaviour for SharePoint lists Included in SP2010 as External Content Types
If the user has Groove client installed, more options will be displayed for data synchronization, in more seamless way. Included in SP2010 as SharePoint Workspace
Master data source for keeping only one version of the truth. Included in SP2010 as centralized metadata management
SharePoint UI will produce clean XHTML-compliant output. Not included in SP2010. The output is WCAG-compliant (no tables) but not strict XHTML.
FAST-based enterprise search as a Search replacement. Webparts that show FAST search results. Included in Enterprise license of SP2010
Custom filters won’t be necessary to index and extract metadata from ODF and PDF files. Not included in SP2010. Third-party IFilters are still necessary
Content Management Interoperability Services will allow SharePoint to communicate with other ECMs via web services. Included in SP2010
Claims-based Authentication mechanism Included in SP2010

8 out of 10 predictions turned true. Maybe I’ve been in the wrong industry all this time 🙂