Richard Riley from the SharePoint Technical Product Management team, the group manager made some significant announcements in a post titled “Announcing SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements.”  Thanks Richard for this very clear post.  Let me break this down for you into Four sections.  Hardware, Server Software, Client, and What Should I do now - preparing for upgrade. 

Hardware – SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64 bit only.  We knew this from a while back as far back as IT Forum November 2007.  This part isn’t new.  Any server hardware you’ve bought in the last 2 years would most likely be 64bit capable, even if you didn’t know what you were buying.

Software

Front End and other SharePoint App Servers

The Operating system will be required to be Windows Server 2008 64bit. (This is new info.  Did you hear this?  This means you WILL NOT be allowed to run Windows Server 2003 for your SharePoint Servers.

SQL Server back end

The SQL Server environment will require SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 in 64bit.  This is new info.  First this means no SQL 2000, and no 32 bit SQL.  The reference in the post mentions scale and performance as justification.  It also saves test cycles to narrow the number of scenarios they need to test, so they can focus on the good stuff, new features and functionality.

Other Considerations:

If you’re environment is a virtual one, then you’ll need to ensure you can support 64bit guest OSs.

Client

Get people upgraded to IE 7 and later.  “Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.x will be required to author content.” Not only is IE 6 going EOL on Jul 2010, but “will not be a supported browser for SharePoint Server 2010.”  This is critical information on what is referred to as tier 1 browsers.  There you have it.  Browser and HTML standards are important and supporting these browsers will help ensure rich editing capabilities.

What Should I do? Preparing for Upgrade Considerations

If you haven’t been using Windows Server 2008, here’s your call to action that any new SharePoint servers and farms you build should be Windows Server 2008… why?  ‘cause you’ll be better prepared for upgrade.   Upgrade will go a lot smoother if all across you’re farms your running SharePoint Server 2007 on 64bit hardware on Windows Server 2008 in 64bit mode.

As well, running your farms today service pack 2 or later (such as April cumulative update).  There a lot of reasons to upgrade.  I recently made a list of 5 reasons to upgrade to WSS and MOSS SP2. you have the upgrade checker preupgrade stsadm utility preupgradecheck included in SP2, and as Todd Klindt suggested in his 6 STSADM commands post and was told there are NO changes to the databases.  That was the promise.  Upgrade Checker does NOT “Automatically fix issues that are identified.” You don’t need to be afraid of it changing anything.  It simply checks for things against a rules input file and provides an output.  There’s also some light reporting.

stsadm –help preupgradecheck

The default list is pretty impressive.  It’s ability to check for orphans, custom stored procedures, table schemas, and index ought to be a wake up call.  I was a big fan of prescan and I’m already an even bigger fan of preupgrade checker.  I’ll try to put more information together in a post, and likely in a deck I’ll start to evangelize to help people get ready for SharePoint Server 2010.

• Sitting on Windows Server 2003 or 32bit Windows Server 2008?  Consider upgrade…
• Sitting on SQL 2000? Consider upgrade…
• Lost track of browsers and browser chaos?  Use this as an excuse to rein in the browsers and get them upgraded and standardized.
• The less you have to touch when you do your SharePoint upgrade, the better off and smoother you’ll be.