Lars Fastrup gets a brief look at SharePoint 2010

Lars Fastrup writes this week in his Lars Fastrup on SharePoint blog, that he got a sneak peek, of sorts, of SharePoint 2010 while visiting the TechEd 2009 conference recently. Fastrup lists some interesting changes including the addition of the navigation ribbon first introduced in Office 2007. While it makes sense to add the ribbon for consistency's sake, I've never been a big fan of this approach (as I wrote in my Office 2007 review called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1]).

Fastrup also points out that the next version of SharePoint will be exclusively 64-bit. While both of these moves make sense on the face of it, it doesn't bode well for companies with lots of legacy hardware in place who are still using older versions of Office. The 64-bit architecture could require a substantial investment in new hardware, while the ribbon approach could mean an investment in training to help users who have been using the menu/toolbar metaphor for their entire working lives.

The other interesting change that Fastrup identifies is the option to use Fast Search instead of the standard SharePoint search tool. As we first reported [2] back in February, Microsoft plans to offer Fast at a discounted price, which should drive adoption and provide an improved search experience for SharePoint users over the standard search tool.

SharePoint 2010 looks to have big changes, but whether companies will adopt those changes, will depend on just how well Microsoft implements the new features and how willing customers running older software and hardware will be at the time to make wholesale changes to their hardware and software to take advantage of the new system.

For more information:
- see Lars Fastrup's complete blog post [3]

Related Articles:
Microsoft packages FAST search with SharePoint [2]
Survey finds SharePoint remains a file share for almost half of users [4]
One on One with Arpan Shah of Microsoft SharePoint [5]