Suggestions when Considering SharePoint 2010…
Microsoft SharePoint upgrades are on the minds of at least some technology executives, as can be seen from my discussion with Hans Keller, senior director of IT operations for Erickson Living. The 11,000-employee company, which manages 19 retirement communities, uses SharePoint 2003 for its intranet, is running a few test instances of SharePoint 2007 and plans to move to SharePoint 2010 to use it as the primary interface into its business intelligence reporting engine.
The goal, Keller told me, is to make SharePoint the first place employees go at the beginning of their work day. He said:
When we roll out Exchange 2010 later this year and have the advanced features of OWA (Outlook Web Access) embedded into SharePoint, hopefully you'll be able to go to the multi-tabbed intranet where you might see Outlook and all of that related information on one tab, then all of your Web applications and Citrix-provisioned applications on another tab, and all of the reports and analytics you need in another tab. I think all of the toolsets are mature enough, and interact together enough, that it will work.
Yet many tech execs will adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward the forthcoming SharePoint 2010 release, expected in the first half of this year. A CIO.com article quotes Scott Gode, VP of product management at Azaleos, a service provider that helps companies deploy and manage SharePoint and Exchange environments, who says many CIOs will wait at least six months after the product becomes generally available or until service pack 1 is released. (Based on my experience, this time frame is pretty common for Microsoft products.) The requirement for 64-bit hardware will hold at least some CIOs back, says Gode.