I am sure many of you are scouring the net looking for new information to help you plan for the next version of SharePoint 2010. Well, today we got more information about platform/system requirement changes for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 will not support IE 6 – While this seems like an interesting development, I would expect this and think it is a smart move. Some organizations have been slow update browsers. Inherently, this increases their security risk, since they are not taking advantage of improvements in IE 8 and 7 to prevent cross-site scripting (site spoofing) and other increased security investments by Microsoft and other vendors. Secondly, I see this as a signal that the era of XHTML 1.0 and W3C compliant browsers is the future focus. This approach will allow the user ultimate flexibility in the long run by allowing them to use any W3C compliant browser against SharePoint with the same experience. Finally, we are seeing an end to the “browse matrix” and compatibility discussion.
64-bit SQL 2005 or 2008 required for SharePoint 2010 – Again, I think this is nothing but goodness! I have been advising my customers for years to use 64-bit machines, 64-bit SharePoint, and 64-bit SQL. The scalability and performance gains from an all 64-bit platform are unreal compared with 32-bit. This just solidifies this “best practice” as a requirement. J
Rehashed News:SharePoint 2010 will be 64-bit only – I don’t think this is a big deal. Every modern server shipped in the past 2 to 4…maybe 5 years has been 64-bit hardware, it only has been OS that people have continued to stay with 32-bit. Sometimes this was for backward compatibility with other code running on the same machine. I think it is time for organizations to fully realize the performance benefits and cost savings of using a 64-bit OS and Applications. Again...Hip Hip Hooray!
SharePoint 2010 Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx