Well, OK so it probably hasn’t been quite as much effort as climbing Everest – but sometimes it’s felt that way! Last week Microsoft made the “final” release version of SharePoint 2010 available to developers and large corporates.  So we have been able to get on with our “final” set of compatibility tests and we can now announce that all of our products are SharePoint 2010 Compatible.

When you make software that works on a particular platform – whether it’s Windows, SharePoint, or the iPhone – the introduction of a major new version is really exciting, but it can also be very stressful. The introduction of a new feature might open up lots of new possibilities, but it could equally well present new problems for the way your own software works with the platform, or even make your application completely redundant.

So as you can imagine we were all over the public beta version of SP2010 as soon as it became available last November. We were very pleased to see that whilst there are lots of fantastic new features in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft haven’t introduced anything within the Out of the Box functionality that undermines our own products. For users of SharePoint 2010 our PivotPoint, Planner and Reminder will continue to add valuable planning, reporting and alert functionality to the Out of the Box offering, and we have also spotted some interesting new possibilities for product development.

Over the past few months we have carried out extensive in house and third party testing on all of our products in the beta version of SP 2010. There are some significant changes in this latest version of SharePoint and we have been busy making sure that our products function properly with these changes.

But we know from past experience that there can be significant differences between the beta version of any piece of software and the final release candidate – that’s what a beta is for after all.  so we know we wouldn’t be finished until we saw the final release candidate – and last week we got it and were able to run our final set of tests.

So we can now say, with confidence “Yes, we are SharePoint 2010 ready.” SharePoint 2010 versions of all of our products are available to download from the website for existing customers who are upgrading to 2010 or new customers who are running or trialling a SP2010 deployment.

Although there is a lot of excitement about SharePoint 2010 we know that many people won’t be upgrading overnight. We know 15% of our clients are still using SharePoint 2003. SharePoint 2010 only runs on 64 bit servers. This means that anyone currently running on 32 bit servers will need to upgrade their hardware before they can upgrade to SP2010. Though this would be normal practice for many large corporate, for smaller businesses on tighter budgets it introduces extra costs and could be a potential barrier to upgrades.

So whilst we are now fully SharePoint 2010 compatible, all of our products also remain compatible with all previous versions of SharePoint and we intend of continue to support all previous versions for the foreseeable future.

And now we are done with compatibility testing for the time being we can get on with some new product development – which should be much more fun!

SharePoint 2010 will be available on general release in May. There are 8 versions and as yet Microsoft have made no announcements regarding pricing.

Tags: Beta, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, WebPart