Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer who loves to pump up a crowd with roaring a mantra--last week it was "tenacious, tenacious, tenacious" and who can forget "developer developer developer developer"--took to the stage at the Microsoft SharePoint conference to announce that the public beta in November of SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010. "It's one of my favorite products at Microsoft," Ballmer said. He added that The IT industry will propel economic growth as we move out of the recession. "SharePoint is in the center of innovation."
According to a Microsoft press release SharePoint Server sales are booming--with over $1.3 billion in revenue. It's one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft history.
Ballmer homed in on three key points of interest in SharePoint 2010--an improved developer platform for SharePoint making it easier to build content and collaborations applications, enhanced Internet site capabilities, and flexiblity to choose an on-premises or a cloud solution.
Here are some of the features Ballmer highlighted:
- A new ribbon UI
- Deep Office integration through social tagging, backstage integration, and document life cycle management
- Built-in support for rich media, including Silverlight
- New web content management features
- Two new SharePoint SKUs
- For developers: Visual Studio 2010 (beta 2 shipped October 19) will have new tools for SharePoint
- For developers: Business connectivity services to enable developers to connect capabilities to LOB data or web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client
- For developers: Rich APIs--support for Silverlight, REST, and LINQ
"By taming the overflow of information acorss systems and technologies, SharePoint enables organizations to thrive," Ballmer said. "SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date."