SPTR: With initial feedback of SharePoint 2010 coming in, what changes will be made in the product prior to its release, if any?
JT: Customers and partners have given us great feedback from the beta. Most of the changes have been around fit and finish, performance, stability and interoperability vs. new features. We are also significantly improving the documentation for administrators and developers.
SPTR: What are the key functional areas you are looking for MS Partners to continue to provide assistance in (i.e., backup and recovery, records management, etc.)?
JT: The SharePoint services opportunity for partners today is $5.6B and expected to grow to $6.1B in FY11. We are very fortunate to have such a successful and innovative partner ecosystem addressing a wide range of needs. Some areas for partners to add value will be more horizontal – such as administrative or developer tools or templates and web parts for end users. Others will be more vertical – such as solutions for law offices or for interoperability with other systems. We also see a great opportunity for partners to help customers fully utilize SharePoint – Server or Online. This includes areas like information architecture, governance and custom portal development.
SPTR: With the size limitations on lists greatly expanded in SP 2010, what is the anticipated impact on server performance, and what actions does Microsoft recommend to minimize such impact?
JT: We will cover this in both our capacity planning and developer pattern guidance. In general, part of the work in SharePoint 2010 was improving the scalability, but we are also introducing throttling and isolation. For example, by default, a user or a custom application is prevented from doing some queries - such as creating a view that returns an unusually large result set. However, administrators can tune this.
SPTR: Has Microsoft begun to think about the direction it will take SharePoint in the release AFTER 2010?
JT: SharePoint Online will be a big focus for us with an update coming in the second half of 2010 . We are also working on the Duet Enterprise release with SAP that simplifies connecting SharePoint and Office to SAP systems. Beyond that we are careful to not lock down our plans too early. We really want to focus on working with customers and partners on their deployments and hearing their feedback. In parallel, we are always doing research and prototyping on a wide range of ideas. I am very excited about the potential to use the FAST technology even more broadly in SharePoint 2010 – there are a lot of new scenarios for internet sites, content management and social networking that go beyond what people traditionally think of as enterprise search.
SPTR: Does Microsoft intend to continue support for WSS 3.0?
JT: Yes, we will support Windows SharePoint Services through a standard Microsoft enterprise support lifecycle.
SPTR: What is the migration path from WSS 3.0 to SP 2010?
JT: We have provided detailed guidance on the SharePoint Blog and TechNet. The main thing customers should plan for is SharePoint 2010 requires 64-bit hardware, so those running on 32-bit will need to upgrade. We gave our customers a heads-up on that over a year ago. The other area is helping users smoothly upgrade their customizations. We have a new feature in SharePoint 2010 called Visual Upgrade, where the site can be upgraded looking exactly like it did on SharePoint 2007, and users can preview and tweak the site before switching to the new UI. We have also been upgrading pre-scanning tools our customers can run today to flag anything they might need to plan for their migration.
SPTR: Is any pricing information available for SP 2010?
JT: It is too early for us to communicate pricing information at this time. It will become available as we get closer to the release of SharePoint2010.
SPTR: When can we expect .NET 4.0 support in SharePoint 2010? The framework is due out in April 2010, yet with SharePoint on a three-year release cycle, any major new functionality is unlikely until 2013. And, Microsoft is already three years behind releasing SharePoint 2010 on .NET 3.5 (ASP.NET 2.0 core).
JT: We’re currently focused on shipping SharePoint Server and Online 2010. The response from developers to the platform improvements and Visual Studio 2010 integration has been great. SharePoint is a large application and this release was optimized for .NET 3.5. Each release we do builds on the latest platform technologies available when we’re in the coding phase. We’ll be continually updating developer guidance on MSDN after we release SharePoint 2010. For now, we are very focused on shipping a high-quality server and service and are not yet into formal planning for what comes next.
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