Yesterday, the 2007 Microsoft Office system preview site went live at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview. It’s so gratifying for me to see the deliverables that I had spent a few months working on finally being published on the Web and available for potentially millions of people to leverage. I’m especially proud of the content on the Office SharePoint Server 2007 page, the development of which my buddy Mayuresh Saoji drove, and in particular, the SharePoint Server Evaluation Guide, for which I was personally accountable.

   The Evaluation Guide is designed to give you a solid understanding of the design goals and feature set for the Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a familiarity with the product implementation. It provides an overview of the solutions and benefits enabled by SharePoint Server as well as descriptions of new and improved features in the areas of portal, search, content management, business forms, and business intelligence. It also provides a hands-on tour of the product’s main feature areas and concludes with useful information for administrators and developers. [These latter sections are currently empty and will be provided in the Beta 2 timeframe, which is just a couple months away.]

   In case you're wondering, the Windows SharePoint Sevices V3 Evaluation Guide was completed just last week and should be posted on the site within the next couple of weeks.

   To ensure that these evaluation guides remain accurate and useful all the way through RTM and beyond, please don’t hesitate to send your questions, suggestions, and corrections to me directly at LLiu@microsoft.com.