Preparing for Rosario – Think “less legacy” (no Office 2003, SharePoint 2 or SQL Server 2005) - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Preparing for Rosario – Think “less legacy” (no Office 2003, SharePoint 2 or SQL Server 2005)

bharry's WebLog - Charting a course for TFS "Rosario"

“It's been on my mind recently to talk about some of the assumptions and pre-requisites that are going to exist for the Rosario release of Team Foundation Server. The main reason is to make sure people have plenty of time to prepare for it. It's still going to be a while before this information is actionable but I just want to make sure you don't have any problems preparing for this in your future upgrade, planning and budgeting cycles. I expect it will be Beta 1 before we have a non-VPC, installable build and that's really the first time that this information might become relevant for you.

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Server Operating Systems - The TFS "Rosario" server will support Windows 2003, Windows 2008 and future Windows Server operating systems. We talked about the possibility of dropping Windows 2003 support but the gains for us seemed small enough that it wasn't worth any pains we'd cause for customers. …

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SQLServer - Perhaps the biggest call we made for Rosario was to drop support for SQLServer 2005. Rosario will only support SQLServer 2008 and later. … I recommend that sometime in the coming months, you plan some time to upgrade your SQLServer to SQLServer 2008 and your TFS server to TFS 2008 SP1. …

Sharepoint - In TFS "Rosario", we will discontinue support for Sharepoint 2.0 and require a minimum of Sharepoint 3.0 (2007) for our portal. …

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Office - In TFS "Rosario" we will be supporting Office 2007 or later. …”

While the Office upgrade will be the thing that hurts the most, I can understand the need to drop legacy infrastructure support. There’s only so much testing you can do, and the new stuff has, well, new stuff which can be taken advantage off. Server side (SQL and SharePoint) is very understandable, the client side, a little less so.

Yeah, I know it’s been 5 five years since Office 2003 was released, but we’re still running a mix of 2003/2007 and due to project requirements (and because you can only have one Office version installed, unless you have App-v, which we don’t) I’m currently stuck with 2003… :( Forcing all my clients/users to upgrade Office version just because Rosario integration requires it… Well it means we might just not use the Office integration, which would be a shame (as I love the Excel integration)

But note that we don’t have a beta yet and these things could change, one way or the other, before RTM.

Also I really only focused on the down side above. There’s a good bit of up side too. 64 bit server support, etc.

In any case, it’s not too early to schedule your server side upgrades plans as Rosario is going to be a “boat load of goodness” and you’re really going to want it when it ships…

(via Team System News - VSTS Links - 09/24/2008)