You have probably seen the news announcement today where we announced the public beta for the new Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. As part of that announcement, we also talked about some of the names for the “14” wave of products including Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. I wanted to answer some questions that I think will inevitably pop to the top of your mind:

What happened to the Office piece of the name? We love MOSS. . . .

The first thing you’ll notice is that the MOSS acronym goes away with the new name since Office is no longer in the SharePoint official name. No one should worry that SharePoint doesn’t work great with Office 2010 since we removed Office from the name, just like people didn’t worry whether SharePoint was a great portal product when we removed Portal from the 2007 name.

The primary reason why we took Office out of the name - lots of folks associate the name Office with the Office client. We wanted to take the opportunity to reestablish the Office name and brand to be synonymous with the client suite. I say “Give the people what they Want” so everyone should immediately think of Microsoft Office = Office apps.

Don’t try to acronym Microsoft SharePoint Server to MSS since MSS is already taken by Microsoft Search Server. Just remember, SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint.

What about Windows SharePoint Services?

When you read through the announcement, you may be wondering what happened to Windows SharePoint Services. While we didn’t announcement anything new for WSS, and I want to assure you that we’re definitely working on a new v4 version of the product. It’s too early to drill into any of the details but WSS is getting a lot of new features and will be a great release. We’ll talk more about WSS at a later date.

So, what was announced?

Here are my key takeaways from the interview with Chris Capossela:

• Exchange 2010 will lead the way for the 2010 (previously referred by its codename “14”) wave of technologies and it will be available in the second half of 2009. You can download a beta today.

• Using Office Web applications, customers will be able to create, edit and collaborate on Office documents through a browser.

• IT professionals will be able to choose to either deploy and manage on-premises or hosted as a service.

• For developers, we are working on Open APIs, deep support for industry standards and developer tool support with Visual Studio 2010.

You can read the entire interview here.

Thomas Rizzo
Sr. Director
SharePoint