It’s Been A While…

 

Hello again everyone. Apologies for the recent radio silence; however the Wave 2010 launch of products has kept me (and hopefully you!) extremely busy!

 

There’s been a lot happening at Microsoft over the last few months. Back in November, we announced public betas of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010. These have been hugely successful, and we’ve had fantastic feedback on the products.

 

2010 Timeline

In mid-April, we announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of the Wave 2010 products, and on May 12th we had our worldwide launch to business customers. The 2010 launch was entirely virtual and delivered over the Internet, in-keeping with our new strategy and focus (more on that to come in later posts…).

 

From a worldwide perspective, Stephen Elop delivered the launch keynote, which contained some great information on the products, and conversations with some key customers who are already using the 2010 solutions. If you didn’t get a chance to watch this live, I would highly recommend watching it on-demand and also looking at the additional videos on the site.

 

We also had a UK launch on the same day, presented by Gordon Frazer and Scott Dodds. This featured some great UK case studies, with interviews from both customers and partners. Again, this can be viewed on-demand.

 

2010 Demos

Now that we’ve officially launched, it’s time for you as partners to start delivering amazing 2010 demos to your customers. Being lovely people, we’ve released a 2010 Virtual Machine image that you can use to get started :)

 

The 2010 Information Worker (IW) demo VM can be downloaded here. This VM comes with Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, FAST, Project Server 2010 and Visio 2010 pre-installed. There are also 200 demo users and lots of content included, to make it easy for you to quickly get a demo environment up and running. For the Project partners out there, there’s a separate Project 2010 content pack, that will add lots of Project content straight into this VM.

 

These VMs are built for use with Hyper-V. (They won’t work with Virtual PC/ Virtual Server as they’re x64). Hyper-V is a role within Windows Server 2008 R2 which allows x64 virtualisation. Full instructions about how to import the VM into Hyper-V can be found on the download pages.

 

One very important thing to note is the hardware specification required to run these VMs. The hardware requirements for the various 2010 solutions can be found on Technet. In particular, SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010 recommend a quad core x64 processor and 8Gb RAM. To run a demo VM, you can get away with slightly lower specs (not at all recommended for any production servers!). I currently have a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 8Gb RAM in total (of which I assign around 6.5Gb to the VM). It’s not lightning fast performance, it’s just about good enough for demos. If it’s feasible, I’d suggest running the VM from a solid state HDD, and remember to cache all of your sites before starting any demo!

 

I’m happy to help partners get their 2010 demos working – if you need any assistance, let me know!

 

Happy demoing! :)