Impact and Roadmap

Overall, SharePoint 2010 is a major release that delivers many improvements. Even organizations that don’t plan an immediate upgrade might need to evaluate SharePoint 2010 in connection with other products released around the same time. A new SharePoint version is unlikely to appear until 2013.

SharePoint 2010 Affects Other Decisions

As described above, SharePoint 2010 integrates with many other products, including Office 2007 and 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Project Server 2010. Organizations can evaluate the latest versions of each of these other products in isolation, as each delivers benefits over its predecessors. However, many of the most interesting new capabilities require SharePoint 2010. (See the illustration “2010 Product Relationships“.) Consequently, the decision to adopt one product in the 2010 generation can commit an organization to adopt several others.

For example, the Office Web Apps and coauthoring features for group work on Office documents require SharePoint 2010. Similarly, the PowerPivot feature requires Excel 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and SQL Server 2008 R2. SharePoint 2010 in turn requires 64-bit editions of SQL Server (2005 SP3 or later) and Windows Server (2008 or later). SharePoint 2010 sites work with Internet Explorer (IE) 7 (not IE 6), Firefox 3, and Safari 3 and later versions of these three browsers, although IE and Firefox on Windows will have some features not available on other OSs.