14 DAY TRIAL // Various Project 2010 releases are now available for purchase and download by a select pool of Microsoft customers. According to Christophe Fiessinger, senior technical product manager on the Microsoft Business Division Product Marketing Group, Project 2010 Professional and Standard, but also Project Server 2010 have been made available via MSFT Volume Licensing since the end of the past month. The Redmond company’s Volume License customers have been able to buy and download the RTM bits of the latest iteration of Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 as of April 30, 2010.
At the same time, as Fiessinger promised at the end of April, developers and IT professionals with MSDN and TechNet subscriptions can now begin to download Project Professional 2010 RTM, Project Standard 2010 RTM, as well as Project Server 2010 RTM. As far as the MSDN and TechNet availability for Project 2010 is concerned, subscribers will be able to notice that there are a variety of localized versions of the products available for download in addition to English, including Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, etc.
“You will also need SharePoint Server 2010, with an Enterprise key, and in the same language as Project. The Project Professional and Standard client in both x86 and x64 are also available (posted a week or so ago). Look in the New Downloads section, or if you are reading this in the future (my future, not yours) then the Servers section,” Brian Smith, support engineer on the Office Project Support team, revealed. “As a reminder, Project Server and SharePoint Server 2010 are x64 only, and require x64 SQL Server. You might like to try the newly released, and available from the same download, SQL Server 2008 R2.”
One critical factor that customers need to take into consideration when deploying the new releases of Project 2010 and Project Server 2010 is the fact that the 64-bit and 32-bit flavors won’t mix. In this sense, even test architectures will have to be done all x64 or all x86.