Highlights from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day One

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas.  Some highlights from the first day of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009:

Steve Ballmer announced the public beta of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, (and Project Server 2010) will be available for download in November.    The final RTM release dates will be sometime in the first half of 2010.

Other news:

· Microsoft has launched a new site for SharePoint 2010 at http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/Pages/default.aspx.  SharePoint 2010 Forums are open on TechNet and MSDN.  There’s also additional SharePoint 2010 beta information on TechNet at  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee428287(office.14).aspx

· Microsoft also announced SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel (Client) and SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint (Server).  PowerPivot is the result of “Project Gemini”.  Briefly, it allows users to access millions of rows of data from Excel or SharePoint.  Further details at www.powerpivot.com

· For developers, SharePoint 2010 now runs on Windows 7 and Vista.