Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer announced the public beta of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010 will become available in November. Announcements were made that the SharePoint Conference yesterday in Las Vegas, NV.

SharePoint Server 2010’s new features range from wikis to workflows. Here are some of the features that will interest ISVs:

• A new ribbon user interface that makes end users more productive and customization of SharePoint sites easy
• Deep Office integration through social tagging, backstage integration and document life-cycle management
• Built-in support for rich media such as video, audio and Silverlight, making it easy to build dynamic Web sites
• New Web content management features with built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout, enabling anyone to access SharePoint Server sites
• New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, giving developers a premier experience with the tools they know and trust
• Business Connectivity Services, which allow developers to connect capabilities to line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client
• Rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform
• Enterprise features in SharePoint Online such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, which make it simple to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization
• The addition of two new SharePoint SKUs for Internet-facing sites, including an on-premises and hosted offer

You can see Ballmer’s address here.

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation