Download the Beta of SharePoint 2010 Today!

Some exciting news was announced this morning at the Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles: You can get started exploring SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 by downloading the beta trials from www.microsoft.com/2010.  SharePoint 2010—together with Office 2010 and other related products—ties together your PC, browser, and mobile device to offer the premier productivity experience. 

In fact, I'm blogging to you right now from the SharePoint booth at PDC 2009, where I'm helping developers see what they can do with the new SharePoint tools.  We’ve announced dramatic innovations that make it easy to build new solutions with SharePoint 2010; see them for yourself and participate in the beta by downloading the new versions of SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010.

Some of the new features you’ll want to explore include the ability to design workflow in Visio 2010 and the interface for surfacing your application’s features with the new Ribbon. If you’re a developer working with SharePoint 2010, you can install the SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 on your Windows 7 machine and develop against it using new Visual Studio 2010 project templates. These templates make it much easier to create compelling new solutions and package them up for simpler deployment, such as the new visual web part.

We’re also giving you easy new ways to connect with your social network.  The Outlook Social Connector lets you connect with people on Windows Live, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  There’s even an SDK for developers that makes it possible to extend and customize code and enable great new scenarios for building connected applications.

Combining Sharepoint and Office 2010 lets users communicate in real time through Outlook, not to mention share/edit Excel, Word and other Office documents simultaneously. And that's just one example of how combining these tools will drive greater efficiency.  To dive deeper, visit www.microsoft.com/2010