As stated at the link here (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=GLuBX_gI8tj), Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will officially be launched on May 12, 2010 @ 11 AM EST.

Some additional information is posted here (translated from German to English): http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.technet.com%2Fzweitausendzehn%2Farchive%2F2010%2F03%2F05%2Frtm-und-launch-termin-technologiegarantie.aspx&sl=de&tl=en

The The Microsoft Office 2010 for Germany Blog on TechNet states that SharePoint and Office 2010 will both go into their Release To Manufacturing (RTM) stage in April. “Corporate office and related products” on May 12th, at the above launch event, and then will be generally available (GA) to the public in June!

Looks like some dates are finally being released to the general public – this is great news! The official launch will also be broadcasted live on the internet, so, go here (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=GLuBX_gI8tj) and save the date!

Thanks to Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) and Bjorn Furuknap (@furuknap) for spreading the good word via twitter!

Paul Andrew, the Technical Product Manager for the SharePoint Developer Platform, mentioned on his blog the other day, that he, and others are presenting a series of 8 webcasts, which will be developer focused events on MSDN.

To sign up for the future events, and, to find recordings of previous events, check here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/sharepointserver.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=42437

I’ve had the good sense to attend a couple of these so far, and they are great, and packed with good information, if you are  a developer interested in learning more about 2010, <plug>in addition to any of my presentations</plug>, there are great resources.

Came across this link via Steve Pietrek’s blog – he posts links from time to time rounding up useful resources, so much so, that I am going to need to watch that more carefully.

One of the links he posted recently was to Erik Swenson’s blog, where he shared (for free), a layered Photoshop file of a default SharePoint 2010 site. This is extremely handy for mock-ups. Thanks Erik! Much appreciated.

You can find that post here: http://erikswenson.blogspot.com/2008/10/ootb-sharepoint-layered-photoshop-file.html

If by chance you did attend (or did not attend) the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and if you did attend (or did not attend) the additional day for the all day post-conference developer session on Friday, October 23rd, hosted by Andrew Connell and Ted Pattison of Critical Path Training, they now have the videos online over at Microsoft’s Channel 9 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SharePoint2010Developer/ of the same content that was delivered (probably however missing the Developer v. Admin joking that took place, with the all-day Admin course happening next door).

Lots of great information during this session, so much so, that I have been waiting for these to come out so that I could review them again. In fact, I think I’ll do that now!

Sorry for the delay on this post. I was away on vacation last week when the updates were made to the Microsoft SharePoint website, and I am still playing catch-up on work.

In any event, Microsoft has released 3 videos talking about some of the new features and what to expect with the next version of SharePoint, each with a different focus (Overview, IT Professional, and Developer). To see these videos, just follow this link: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

Under each of the videos, they also list several highlights about the new version for that specific focus. All of these of course are directing people to the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this October (http://www.mssharepointconference.com/). Not going? You should…

In addition to this, they have also released a technical preview of the SharePoint 2010 SDK available from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94afe886-3b20-4bc9-9a0d-acd8cd232c24&displaylang=en

Also, Bjørn Furuknap, who writes the Understanding SharePoint Journal, has started a series on what developers can expect based off of news in the blogosphere, twittersphere, and the SDK, which can be found here: http://www.sharepoint2010beta.com/