If you are new to SharePoint 2010, the v-Article on introducing SharePoint 2010 will help you get started.

What is a v-Article? Check out the explanation here.

I was notified today that my profile was highlighted on TechNet as a featured SharePoint MVP:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff400167.aspx

Thanks Microsoft

Are you ready? Well, I hope so… because the downloads are ready now. Download them, install them and Enjoy! Not much else to say about this

SharePoint Designer 2010:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d88a1505-849b-4587-b854-a7054ee28d66

SharePoint Foundation:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595

There are a bunch of SharePoint presentations that can be downloaded for free from the member’s area at Critical Path Training site. Check it out here:

http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Members/Pages/Presentations.aspx

The presentations currently there are from me, Andrew Connell, Ted Pattison, and Scot Hillier. More will be added after each conference. I would suggest signing up for the member’s area (did I mention it was free ) and taking advantage of it.

The long anticipated release of SharePoint 2010 is almost here now! Arpan Shah, director of SharePoint, announced the official date of launch to be May 12th. The RTM is going to be even earlier, April, so you should be able to download the bits directly from MSDN or TechNet at that time.

At the same time, SharePoint Designer 2010 should become available as a free download from Microsoft’s site. My advice would be to download it right away to truly start taking advantage of the 2010 release. Please keep in mind that SharePoint Designer 2010 will not work without SharePoint 2010 so you cannot use it to attach to a SharePoint 2007 site.

The most popular type of site template used in most SharePoint 2007 deployments is the Team Site template. The Team Site template provides a great platform to facilitate collaboration among peers in a team or department. However, there is another type of site template which is best utilized in large Intranet and Internet sites. In both of these scenarios, you will want only a few people to control the content that’s being published. On the other hand, there is usually hundreds if not thousands of people who will be reading this content. For this scenario, a Publishing Site template is best utilized.  

A publishing site is a feature of SharePoint Server Standard or above. This concept was integrated into SharePoint Server when Content Management Server (no longer a product by itself) was rolled into SharePoint in the 2007 release. A publishing site has publishing pages which contain field controls in addition to web part zones and web parts. These pages reside in a very special library called Pages. The pages in the Pages library all derive from pre-defined page layouts which tell the page how to position its content on the page. For example, a page layout can have a placeholder on the top right of the page to hold a picture while another page layout can have a picture placeholder at the top left of the page, but the same content regions as the other page layouts. 

Watch this video to see the differences being pointed out in a Team Site and a Publishing Site: Publishing Sites vs Team Sites.

Lots more of the videos have been made available for you to preview for free on the site for this week. If you are interested in any of the topics below, check the videos out at: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/all-free-videos/

• Publishing Pages with Workflow in Publishing Sites 
• Control Content Approval and Publishing on a Library with Approval Workflow 
• Attach a SharePoint Designer Workflow to a Data View web part 
• Create a Powerful SharePoint Designer Workflow – Part 2 
• Initial Configuration of a new SharePoint Installation
• Use Content Query and Site Aggregator web parts to roll up your data
• Create a Master Detail relationship using web part connections
• Configure Single Sign On
• Create a Custom Search site
• Customize List View Web Parts using SharePoint Designer

There are two versions of SharePoint Server 2010 beta available to the public:

SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Client Access License features)

For organizations looking to expand their business collaboration platform to enable advanced scenarios. Use the Enterprise capabilities of SharePoint to fully interoperate with external line-of-business applications, web services, and Microsoft Office client applications; make better decisions with rich data visualization, dashboards, and advanced analytics; and build robust forms and workflow-based solutions.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise

For organizations looking to create customer-facing public internet sites and private extranets using the full enterprise capabilities of SharePoint. This provides full SharePoint Enterprise functionality and no other technical limits.

Download either of them from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee388573.aspx

Keep in mind that you need a 64 bit environment to install SharePoint 2010 on. Check out my earlier post for the link to hardware requirements or choices for running it in a virtual environment.

With so much information coming out now about SharePoint 2010 and related technologies, I’m sure many are wondering how they can get their hands on the actual software. Well, the public beta is scheduled for this month (November 2009). However, this does not mean that you will automatically be able to download it. You need to pre-register first to participate in the beta. Here is the page where you can pre-register: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx.

Before you go to pre-register however, you should also consider the hardware requirements for installing SharePoint 2010. If you plan to run it on a physical server, make sure it’s a 64bit machine. On the other hand, if you want to play with it in a virtual environment, then here are your options:

• Hyper-V
• Mount the vhd using Windows 7 and boot directly into it
• VMWare technologies

I used to have many virtual machines for SharePoint 2007 (in fact I still do) which were created in Virtual PC 2007. Virtual PC does not support 64-bit so that’s out of the question now

Following are the new videos we posted this week for our site Subscribers:

• SharePoint Architecture Planning
  

  This video presents and talks through the architecture, pre-requisites and preparation required to plan for a WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 installation. It shows the supporting services required for the installation and also how to plan for the OS, IIS, and other requirements that serve as the necessity for planning a successful SharePoint deployment.
  

• Installing SharePoint
  

  This video demonstrates the process of installing WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 as a single server install. Then it shows how to setup some of the global settings that need to be immediately configured after the install. The video also examines how to assign server roles in a SharePoint server farm.
  

• Initial Configuration of a new SharePoint Installation
  

  This video shows the process of setting up initial configuration settings that need to be made on a new SharePoint installation. Administration tasks such as setting up services across multiple servers is also shown. Incoming and outgoing mail settings are demonstrated. Also, the installation of pdf ifilter is demonstrated so that pdf files can be indexed and searched by SharePoint.
  

More coming up next week. 

We are eagerly awaiting the time when we can show you SharePoint 2010 information. We have already started creating videos on it. It’s going to be super exciting stuff!

Wanna get a sneak peek at what Microsoft SharePoint 2010 looks like? You can check out the new features in the videos on this page at Microsoft’s SharePoint site. There are 3 videos out there: Overview, IT Pro and Developer focused. Keep in mind that you will need Silverlight in order to watch these videos so please download it first if you don’t have it installed already.

Since I’m not a developer anymore, my focus was more so on watching the Overview and the IT Pro videos. Here are a few things to look out for which are discussed in the videos:

Tom Rizzo’s Overview video

• SharePoint Designer’s new UI and the enhanced capabilities (my favorite of course )
• Visio Server integration
• SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove)
• Editing content directly and easily on web pages
• Silverlight web part
• Multiple browser support
• The new BDC (now called Business Connectivity Services)

Richard Riley’s IT Pro video

• The new and easy to use look of SharePoint’s Central Administration
• SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer
• Support and guidance for working with large Lists
• Usage Reporting
• How Visual Upgrade will work

I don’t know about you, but I’m Super Excited about the new version of SharePoint. As soon as I am allowed to (which is most probably late October), I will be posting Lots of screencasts on the SharePoint-eLearning.com website to show you the new functionality in SharePoint 2010. Stay tuned…