The following slides were leaked yesterday by Maarten Visser (chief executive of Meetroo, an IT solution provider). Although no word on the slides authenticity has come out of Microsoft, respected IT journalist Mary-Jo Foley has backed the slides stating they were confidentially distributed by Microsoft to selected partners.
What does this means for SharePoint and Office?
The slides confirm some of the rumoured dates that had already been circulating rather than providing and great twists in the guessing games of when the new releases will be out.
As already rumoured, the next wave of products will be a synchronised effort across server and desktop technologies meaning we will see a refresh of SharePoint Server, Office 365, Office Desktop Suite, Project, Visio and Internet Explorer.
The expectation for us to be seeing Beta software continues to be mid 2012 with general availability early 2013.
Microsoft have also released the SharePoint 15 Technical Preview Interoperability API Documentation which provides a lot of information regarding change to the SharePoint 15 client object model.
The expected enhancements we can look forward to in the next release of SharePoint (if any of the loud rumours are correct):
Here’s a summary of the suggested, forthcoming improvements to SharePoint:
- SharePoint app marketplace
- Overhauled Client Object Model (COM)
- Better suited for cloud environment
- Improved UI, especially around social networking
- Improved mobile support
- Simplified development and integration
- Enable workflow looping in SharePoint Designer, eliminating the need for the Visual Studio
- Cross-platform authentication
Cameron Dwyer 
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