#spc09 SharePoint 2010 Breaks Down Silos Between Enterprise and the Web

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Oct 20, 2009

SharePoint 2010 Breaks Down Silos Between Enterprise and the Web The SharePoint 2009 Conference kicked off officially yesterday with the keynotes from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Office Business Platform. If you had the time to listen to keynotes (which were streamed live), then you know Microsoft is expecting big things for SharePoint 2010 (news, site) — not just for the enterprise but also for the web.

Read Between the Tweets

If you didn't have time to watch/listen to the SharePoint Conference 2009 keynotes, you always had Twitter to fall back on.

Yes, Twitter was all abuzz yesterday even before the keynotes began. And amazingly enough, it did not go down under the massive number of tweets. But it was hard to filter out what the key highlights were for SharePoint 2010.

The Market for SharePoint 2010

Tom Rizzo, Senior Director of Product Management for SharePoint said Microsoft thinks of SharePoint as "6 servers in 1". He said silos between workloads are breaking down and SharePoint 2010 has been designed to show the integration of these silos. That's why they call SharePoint 2010 the Business Collaboration Platform for Enterprise and the Web.

That was the actual plan for SharePoint 2007 as well, but SharePoint 2010 delivers on this integration much better.

SharePoint 2010

Taking on the Web

Microsoft has huge plans for SharePoint to break down the silos between the enterprise and the web (which includes the cloud). That's right, even though their original intention for SharePoint was not for externally based websites, they have now embraced the Internet and are offering SharePoint 2010 as a single platform for your Intranet and Internet needs.

To help, they have added two new SKUs to SharePoint 2010:

SharePoint for Internet Sites Standard: Rizzo told us that Microsoft was astounded by the adoption of SharePoint for Internet websites. They believed they had a great solution for high-end websites but at a price point that SMBs could take on. SharePoint for Internet Sites Standard is the standard on premise version.
SharePoint Online for the Web: This is similar to SharePoint Online that exists today, but it's for internet websites. It will have both dedicated and SaaS versions, with an emphasis on shared hosting to keep costs down for SMBs.

What's in a Name, It's Still Free

Another point of interest is the renaming of the Windows SharePoint Services. Now called SharePoint Foundation 2010, it's still the free base platform for SharePoint that you get when you have Windows Servers. The renaming was for clarity.

Rizzo told us that many of the SharePoint APIs have been moved down into the base platform to enable developers to build solutions that will work on either SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010.

As an example, you can now access the BCS (Business Connectivity Services) object model in SharePoint Foundation. Not all BCS functionality is there, but enough that you can build on it and not have to build something completely different.

CMIS Support

Of course we wanted to know more about SharePoint's support for CMIS. And although Rizzo says Microsoft is 100% behind the standard, it's not yet clear if SharePoint 2010 will ship with support for the standard out of the box. It comes down to timing — when will CMIS be officially certified vs when SharePoint 2010 will ship GA.