We have launch! SharePoint 2010 has been delivered, and here’s what Microsoft has announced today:

Today, Microsoft Corp. announced the worldwide availability of Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, as well as Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010, for business customers worldwide. More than 90 million businesses can now deploy the 2010 suite of products, and customers can expect to see significant productivity gains and greater return on their software investments.

“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 define the future of productivity,” said Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division. “With 2010, organizations will save, innovate and grow as their people benefit from working across the PC, phone and browser.”

A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, “The Total Economic Impact Of Implementing Microsoft’s Integrated Productivity Platform,” evaluated the 2010 releases of Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The Forrester TEI model employs four fundamental elements, including costs, benefits to the entire organization, flexibility and risk. Based on the customer interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework for a composite organization and found the ROI to be 301% with a payback period of 7.4 months after deployment. The study also found that the composite organization would see more than US$13 million in savings over a three-year period and, on average, a savings of more than two work weeks per year.

Microsoft’s Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 beta programs were the largest ever, with three times the number of participants compared to prior Office beta programs. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products.

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In the past couple newsletters, we asked for your comments regarding key tasks you’ve come to rely on in 2007, or expect you’ll need in 2010. Here is a sampling:

For me, the big feature in SharePoint 2010 is that Access now allows one to build Web-based applications that run on SharePoint. This solves all of the distribution issues, security issues, and even centralized backup of data that often have been a pain point for the IT department having to support MS Access applications. Here is a video of an Access application I built, and at the halfway point, I switch to running the application in a browser.
 
Watch it in full screen. SharePoint people should find it quite interesting.
 
So all of those great little applications people build in Access can now be pushed up to SharePoint. This eliminates the issues of Office versions and issues of scaling and sharing with many users. And it all is based on the security of SharePoint. The data is being backed up and centrally managed. Once, I had not been that interested in SharePoint; now I have a great RAD tool for developing SharePoint applications with Access 2010.
 
Albert D. Kallal (Access MVP)
Edmonton, Alberta

In response to the request for tasks/concepts that users find difficult to remember, I’ve had several users recently ask me how they can set and manage their e-mail alerts. They told me they figured it out once but couldn’t remember how they did it. Alerts are crucial because everyone lives in e-mail. I think the whole alert system is backwards. You shouldn’t have to set alerts from the lists/libraries. You should be able to go to a central place to create and manage your alerts.

P.S. I really enjoy SPTechReport. For me, it has the right blend of useful technical info and your personal insights, experiences and humor.

Ken Hampel (Siemens Corp.—Corporate Research)
Princeton, New Jersey

We have been using SharePoint 2007 for several years as part of our extranet for use between our employees and our clients. We have many critical functions we use SharePoint for, specifically the management of our clients’ customer data. We spend a great amount of time with the development limitations for SharePoint 2007. And now finally we can easily build visual Web Parts with normal ASPX development methodologies.

We have already migrated two features to SharePoint 2010. The user experience is significantly better, though the Edit Ribbon takes a bit of getting used to for those users who have not used Office 2007. But they quickly learn how to use the tools and move on.

Richard Ozenbaugh (Gaine Solutions)