MCMS News from TechEd USA 2005 :: Day 2 (Yes, there's more!!!)

Arpan Shah’s second MCMS 2002 session at TechEd 2005 USA , PRT337 - Best Practices for Designing and Building Content Management Server Solutions, covered a ton of great information on best practices, things you shouldn’t do, things you should look at, etc. But first, the breaking news all MCMS developers have been waiting for!

MCMS 2002 Service Pack 2: Expect this to be released after the .NET 2.0 Framwork is released (BTW: today’s keynote at TechEd announced that Visual Studio .NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will be released to manufacturing [RTM] the week of November 7, 2005). The primary focus of SP2 will be to add .NET 2.0 Framework and SQL Server 2005 support to MCMS. Yes, you how have access to using master pages (just no placeholders within the master pages… that’s not supported) and all the other great features that are provided by the next generation of ASP.NET 2.0. This does not mean I’m not saying that you can touch the MCMS database, you just can host your database on the new platform. The only thing that isn’t supported is using the new ASP.NET 2.0 web parts within MCMS templates.

MCMS vNext aka: futures: Yes, speculation can now end in the newsgroups and blogs that it’s now confirmed there is a new version of MCMS in the works. When will it be available?MCMS is now part of the Office System. At the recent CEO Summit, Bill Gates announced that Office 12 will ship at the end of 2006 and you can expect a beta at the end of 2005/beginning of 2006. Because MCMS is in now part of the Office System, it will fall in line with those dates. Packaging & licensing is still being hashed out so no details on that. Again, just stay tuned for news in the coming months.