Another great debate happening in enterprises and corporations of all sizes.  I’ve heard this question way too many times today and the dynamics of what’s going on at SPTECHCON continues to bring up this with half the rooms on 2007 and half on SharePoint 2010.  The ultimate question… Should I stay with the proven SharePoint Server 2007 either in a green field deployment or even with the new project the business is asking me to deploy, or do I go with SharePoint 2010 and take whatever comes with that good and bad, the reward with the risk.

When I say GO, that means don’t WAIT, but start your project assuming you’ll be able to build your prototypes and so forth on SharePoint 2010 prerelease versions.

Ultimately this entire story is IT DEPENDS… I don’t like to say that.  I’d rather say.  Let’s make some assumptions and give you a story…  The more you know the smarter decision you can make.

When is the SharePoint 2010 release date?

Another common question.  I can’t tell you what I know, but what I can tell you is Chris Capposella SR VP of IW Product Division in Microsoft Business Division’s estimate of 1st half of calendar 2010 still applies.  The product team has not adjusted this statement, despite what you might hear in the twitterverse. (as of this posting)

Reasons You Should Consider Starting with SharePoint 2010 (Even though it’s early)

There are some scenarios that I consider obvious candidates to not wait, but to start the process of working with SharePoint 2010 in it’s prerelease state to build out the requirements.  Here are some examples of requirements or scenarios that would drive an early 2010 adoption verses building something out on 2007.

• Social Networking sites like My Sites
• Using SharePoint as an App platform
• Business data integration
• Large data migration
• Enterprise Content Management projects
• High Availability
• IT Control

Social Networking

Why would I say to go with 2010.  If you build on 2007, you will loose any work you put into your mysite designs.  There is NO visual upgrade of my sites in 2007.  As well, all of the new status, network and collegue work in 2010 is generations ahead of 2007.  The wikis as well are much better in 2010.

App dev

Application development in 2010 is much easier.   Much of it is easier as a result of the work in Visual Studio 2010.  An example of that is F5 debugging, templates for common SharePoint scenarios.  The creation of SharePoint solutions is easier and the deployment is easier, and even the hosting is easier.  Sandbox solutions, throttling, resource management and more make this a much more easy to support, manage, use, and on and on.  Let alone the pains of upgrading a customized solution that will later need to be visually upgraded and solutions may need to be upgraded as well.  Let alone support for newer technologies like Silverlight support in the box including streaming video, compliant XHTML and WCAG accessibility support, cross browser support for Firefox and on and on.  The dev story is really enticing, as is the hosting/management story.

Stay on 2007

5 Reasons You Might Consider Waiting

While it ultimately may come down to your timelines,

• Timeline
• Requirements addressed with 2007
• Data Center or Hardware Standards Requirements Your companies ability to support 64 bit Windows Server 2008 or SQL 2008 (or SQL 2005 SP2)
• Company adoption standards of products or even specifically Microsoft products
• Lack of knowledge on licensing & release date for planning

It’s a bit unusal to post a blog before it’s complete, but I don’t want to hold onto this… I wish it was a wiki.  I’ll flush this out as I get time.