Two new resources available as free downloads from Microsoft will permit customers to test-drive a range of new products including Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010. Office 2010 was released to manufacturing in mid-April 2010, a deadline that was also synonymous with the RTM of SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010 and Visio 2010. Subsequently, the Redmond company made available for download the RTM version of the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine.

According to the official description accompanying the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) download, the resource offers no less than two Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Virtual Machines with Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010 pre-installed and configured.

The “a” virtual machine is focused on Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Project 2010, while machine “b” is designed to allow the testing of Exchange Server 2010. Customers interested in the testing opportunities provided by the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM) will find a list with all the contents of the two virtual machines at the bottom of this article.

“Active directory has been preconfigured over 200 ‘demo’ users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010,” Microsoft noted. “SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a ‘Complete’ farm using the default SQL Server 2008 R2 instance. A default site has been created using the Team Site template at http://intranet.contoso.com/ and a FAST Search Center at http://intranet.contoso.com/search/. As shipped virtual machine ‘a’ requires image &ldsquo;b’ for email. Running image ‘b’ is optional.”

Both virtual machines allow customers to evaluate the technologies enumerated below for a period of 180 days (Login info - User: administrator; Password: pass@word1; Domain: CONTOSO):

Microsoft revealed that, “Virtual machine ‘a’ contains the following pre-configured software:

“- Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the ‘CONTOSO.COM’ domain with DNS and WINS;
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services;
- Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2;
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010;
- Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition;
- Microsoft Office Web Applications;
- Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010;
- Microsoft Project Server 2010;
- Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010;
- Microsoft Visio 2010;
- Microsoft Project 2010;
- Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2.


“Virtual machine ‘b’ contains the following pre-configured software:

“- Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the ‘CONTOSO.COM’ domain;
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.”

2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine RTM is available for download here.