Last night, I read that the beta version of SharePoint 2010 was available on msdn.com and couldn't resist getting an immediate feel for where exactly Microsoft stands with this new release. So I downloaded the SharePoint Foundation 2010 (correlates to the "Windows SharePoint Services", the "free" basic version of SharePoint) and started the install.

 

SharePoint now has a Welcome dialog that looks familiar to many of the other server products released in the last year or so, including valuable links and - most important! - a link to install the "prerequisites". Usually running this tool means that the install doesn't crash out halfway through when it recognizes that a vital component is missing.

 

 

The installation of the prerequisites took about 15 minutes on my machine (that was up-to-date on service packs etc.) which is not too bad. However I got a strange feeling from the fact that configuring the IIS role took about 10 minutes of those 15. Well, it all seemed to have worked in the end.

 

Onto installing SharePoint - only to be greeted by another alert:

 

 

Great, the software is telling me that I made a mistake and that I should have read the note about the installation prerequisites... well, you are welcome to check the first screenshot above for yourself for a mention of that KB97183! BTW, you can grab that Hotfix here.

 

I'd call that a "departments out of sync error", as this is about a release that was just dropped, which practically means that one team involved with documentation and another team involved in coding the prerequisite checks don't properly communicate. That, however reminds me too much about one of the fatal flaws in SharePoint 2007: obviously the developers never really got their communication right with the technical documentation folks. I was promised in Vegas at the recent SharePoint conference that this time around the documentation would be much better and "complete". Let's see, shall we?

 

 

Once past the common License Terms confirmation, the familar SharePoint setup dialogs appeared... slightly different background, but very much the same as in 2007.

 

 

This time I opted for something I usually NEVER do: I chose the "Standalone" option, which doesn't allow you to easily add servers to the farm. My reasoning was that, if anything would, this option should work. (I'll try the "real" farm installation right after this)

 

The install went fine all through-out. However, when I came to the end, the "Applying Updates" status stayed on forever ...as it was late I just went to bed and left it running, so I have no idea what major part was downloaded and replaced at that point.

 

 

This morning, the install had completed properly and I was able to start the usual Wizard.

 

And finally, after the wizard had finished, I got to see the Home page of SharePoint 2010! :-)

 

 

Here, of course, I couldn't resist immediately checking the compatibility of one of our SharePoint 2007 products. So I installed the latest beta of our up-coming Metadata Extractor program and voila, the install and deployment worked all fine.

 

 

The only issues I could see are with some user interface elements that our solution adds which are not displayed in SharePoint 2010. So my initial feel is that there is a good amount of backwards compatibility, but definitely some additional work required to port SharePoint 2007 solutions to SharePoint 2010.