SP2, CMS Future and Workflow partner

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Quick blog entry: At TechEd 2005, I presented 3 sessions. 2 breakout sessions and 1 cabana talk. It was great to see the excitement around CMS and SharePoint Products and Technologies. In one of my sessions I talked about CMS SP2 and talked about the future of CMS. I crammed A LOT of information in 2 sessions... the intent being to give a ton of info and letting folks dive into the areas of interest offline.

CMS SP2 - the focus of Service Pack 2 (SP2) is around the supportability of the latest development and database platforms: VS.NET 2005/.NET Framework 2.0 ("Whidbey") and SQL Server 2005 ("Yukon"). The plan of record is to support the .NET Framework 2.0 runtime and IDE integration => if you're a developer on Whidbey, you can use the greatest tools for CMS development. I want to be very transparent here: we don't plan on supporting the web part framework of Whidbey and other new features of Whidbey. The only new features we're planning to support are the auth and nav provider model and master pages.

Future - CMS is part of the Office System. If you're not familiar with what the Office System is and what the investment areas are, take a look at https://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2005/05-19ceosummit.asp.  What that means is that the next version will be part of Office System and follows the same release/beta timeline: beta at the end of this year/beginning of next and release expected at the end of next year. Licensing/packaging is yet to be determined. This is all great news and I'm personally thrilled to be part of this.

Workflow Partner - Skelta, https://www.skelta.com, announced that they are providing a workflow lite version of their product w/ seamless integration with CMS. You will be able to run 25 concurrent workflow processes at any given time - which is quite good for more web content management solutions. ETA is end of July. Best part - it's free. :-)

We at Microsoft -are- listening and working hard to deliver the right technologies. We talk to a lot of CMS customers, partners and, of course, the CMS MVPs - Andrew, Angus, Joel, Mei Ying and Spence.