SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements – x64 all the way!

News from TechEd 2009 this morning on the requirements for the next release of SharePoint – which will be called SharePoint Server 2010. As Project Server 2010 will be built on the same platform then expect similar requirements. In brief these are: SharePoint Server 2010 will be 64-bit only – this was announced during the SP2 webcasts for Project Server, so isn’t totally new news. SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 SharePoint Server 2010 will require 64-bit SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit SQL Server 2005 SharePoint Server 2010 will require a standards based browser to author content (XHTML 1.0 compliant) so will not support IE 6. The 64-bit SQL requirement is new news, and I feel this makes a lot of sense. We have seen customer’s adopting 64-bit for SQL at a fast pace, and have seen great benefits for Project Server 2007 – so to only release 64-bit Office Servers and to support 32-bit database back-end would not have made much sense. Likewise dropping support for IE 6 (which end it’s support lifecycle anyway in July 2010) should not cause too many concerns. If my blog readers are any indication the IE 8 users have already overtaken IE 6 – which accounts for less than 1 in 5 browsers to my blog. This only applies to authoring content – and it will still be possibly to target a SharePoint published site to IE 6 for viewing. I do appreciate though that some corporations still have IE 6 as the norm – so time to start planning that move! Remember that in 2007 Project Server had a tighter requirement on browsers than SharePoint – and blocked non-IE browsers from the PWA sites (but not workspaces). I haven’t seen any announcement on any changes here. Technorati Tags: SharePoint Server 2010,Project Server