14 DAY TRIAL // Concomitantly with the public availability of Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000, Microsoft has also widened the testing program for the next generation of SharePoint Server. In this regard, users can not only download the latest iteration of Office 2010 in Beta stage, but also access the first Beta development milestone of SharePoint Server 2010. IT professionals that decide to test drive SharePoint 2010 public beta should know that Microsoft doesn’t offer support for the release, and they will have to deal with eventual problems by themselves or look for answers with other Beta testers.
“Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta is the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web that enables you to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features. Whether deployed on-premise or as a hosted service, SharePoint Server 2010 helps you cut costs with a unified infrastructure while allowing you to rapidly respond to your business needs,” Microsoft revealed.
According to the Redmond company, early adopters, that don’t want to go through the hassles associated with the actual deployment of SharePoint 2010 Beta, will have an alternative in the future. Microsoft is cooking a Virtual Hard Disk image with the first Beta of SharePoint, allowing testers to have a go to the business collaboration platform inside a virtual machine.
“There are two versions of SharePoint Server 2010 Beta: SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Client Access License features) - For organizations looking to expand their business collaboration platform to enable advanced scenarios,” Microsoft added. “[And] 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.”
Just as it is the case with the Office 2010 System, Microsoft plans to release SharePoint Server 2010 come next year. In fact, commercial availability is scheduled sometime by mid-2010, with the software giant not yet ready to make public the GA deadline.
SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is available for download here.