Microsoft has released a demo virtual machine consisting of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Beta. The download titled “2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta)” is a 2 part Hyper-V based virtual machines. Note that you will need to allocate at least 6GB to the primary SP2010 VM to be able to demo and work on this. The optimal recommendations are listed on the download page. http://tinyurl.com/IWSP2010 System Requirements: Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard In order to run this demo you will need the following: - Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role enabled. - Drive Formatting: NTFS - Processor: Intel VT or AMD-V capable - RAM: 8 GB or more recommended - Hard disk space required for install: 50 GB. For my demo setup I use a HP 8530W EliteBook Pro Wo ...[Read More]

With the momentum growing for the next release of SharePoint there are quite a large number of pre-release (Beta) resources available now to get a head start for SharePoint 2010. Here are some of these that you can use to get started. Understanding the various versions of SharePoint 2010. – Networked world has this article titled “SharePoint 2010: A guide to the many versions - Network World” about the various options of this release. A good read if you want to determine what it is that you’d need to plan for. Operating System Requirements for SharePoint 2010 – For planning and guidance for ensuring that you are making the right choice in your hardware purchases today for SharePoint 2010. (In a nutshell SP2010 can run only in x64 capable architecture). More details are available on TechNet which will also be updated once productio ...[Read More]

SharePoint 2010 Beta is now available for download. The pre-release (BETA) version is for evaluation purposes only.  Upgrade from the BETA version to the final release version of SharePoint 2010 is NOT supported by Microsoft. You can view the pre-requisites for installing SharePoint Products on TechNet. The most important one is that you will need Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) 64bit for SharePoint to be deployed with a min of 8GB of memory to test and evaluate the Beta. Read hardware and software requirement article on TechNet Developers can install SharePoint for development purposes on Windows 7. Below is a list of links to obtaining the downloads SharePoint Foundation 2010 Beta (Formerly Windows SharePoint Services) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=906c9f5a-6505-4 ...[Read More]

Please refer to my previous three posts on Upgrade Planning for SharePoint 2010 – These previous posts outline some important scenarios for your upgrade planning process. SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning Part 1, SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning Part 2, SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Planning Part 3. In this post I’ll outline the supported scenarios for your SharePoint 2010 upgrade from SharePoint 2007 and how to determine a best approach for your upgrade. I have been working with a few clients who are currently on SharePoint 2007 and are looking to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. So I will try and provide some real world data as part of this post. If you’ve been following my post series I outlined the steps and the approach to move your SharePoint 32bit farm to 64bit since SharePoint 2010 is only available and supported in 64 bit Windows Server ...[Read More]

Please read first two posts in this series. Planning for SharePoint 2010 Part 1, Planning for SharePoint 2010 Part 2. In the last two posts I showed you how to move your data tier to your new 64bit Farm. That is you moved all your databases and tested that you now have a 64bit based database server to host all the content databases. Let’s look at how we can move the application server and the web front end server tiers. In this case you can choose to move both Tiers Tier B and C at the same time or individually. In either case the approach is the same. In order to move your Application Server(s) and the Web Front End Server(s) you’ll need to first install the SharePoint binaries on the servers on Farm B. With information you gathered in your audit you’ll need to do a fresh install of SharePoint on the SPAPP1 server. Note that yo ...[Read More]

Please read Part 1 of this post series before you continue. In this post I will highlight how to move your (32 bit) SQL Server tier to 64 bit. In the case of moving your data tier there are few prerequisites that you should consider. In this case we have the assumption that your new 64bit SQL server deployment has followed best practice guidelines for SQL server. From a SharePoint point of view you should consider the following to enable effective management of your existing content databases or any new databases you are creating. SQL Server 2008 or 2005 (64bit) are both supported when moving to SP2010. Details about preparing your database server can be found here (TechNet). This may be a good time to also plan what your SQL maintenance regime would look like for your new data tier. Start with Database maintenance guidance for Sha ...[Read More]