Thomas Rizzo, senior director of SharePoint at Microsoft, took some time to talk about what’s new and what’s coming for SharePoint 2010 with SharePointPro Connections executive editor Sheila Molnar and her colleague Michael Otey, technical director for Windows IT Pro.

Molnar and Otey: Hi Tom. It’s great to have a chance to catch up with you. Before we get started, we understand that you go back quite a ways on Microsoft SQL Server before you moved to SharePoint.

Thomas Rizzo: I’ve been at Microsoft for close to 15 years. I worked in the Exchange Server team. I worked in the SQL Server team for about five or six years. And then I worked in the SharePoint team. So I worked on all the server products. It’s interesting to see Microsoft grow up in the enterprise—starting with Exchange Server, then SQL, and now SharePoint as our big enterprise product.

Molnar and Otey: So do you see this as natural growth for you to have come over to SharePoint?

Rizzo: SharePoint actually grew out of Exchange, so it’s a little bit of coming home for me. The original SharePoint, code-named Tahoe, shipped in 2001. It was built on the Exchange Web Storage System, not SQL Server, in the first version. It shipped with Exchange 2000. The Exchange and SharePoint team are like one big happy team.

And then we decided that the long-term data storage for the company was probably not the Exchange Store, because it’s a very specialized store for email and that sort of thing. At that time I went to work on the SQL Server business. The SharePoint team decided to build on top of SQL Server because it was our enterprise database and business intelligence product.

When I came back to SharePoint, it was like coming home. A lot of the same people who worked on SharePoint in 2001 still work on SharePoint even today. The same person who founded the team still works there and runs it—Jeff Teper.

Molnar and Otey: SharePoint is certainly one of the hottest server products Microsoft has right now.

Rizzo: Yes, it’s the fastest growing. We hit over 1.2 billion dollars last year. 17,000 customers. A lot of people think of SharePoint as just collaboration and intranet search. But we’ve expanded into a lot of other areas. A lot of big Internet-facing sites run SharePoint now. So you may not even know it, but folks like Kraft and Hawaiian Airlines are on SharePoint for their Internet-facing site. Recovery.gov is running SharePoint. So that’s a big area—growing our Internet business.

One of our big bets was the FAST Search & Transfer acquisition for 1.2 billion dollars. We wanted really high-end search because high-end search powers the Internet. We worked to integrate the FAST team and combined it with SharePoint Web Content Management to build a really great Internet business offering.

You’ll see in the 2010 release how FAST is an integral part of the SharePoint offering this year. The other area we invested in for the 2010 release is business intelligence (BI). SQL is a major part of the Microsoft BI stack, but so is Office with Excel and now SharePoint with Performance Point Services and Excel Services. It’s interesting to see SharePoint grow from the original three workloads to many workloads.

Molnar and Otey: With SharePoint 2010 there are several editions available. What are the different offerings? How did they come about?

Rizzo: We retired some things. We got rid of some products. But we added more than we got rid of.

Molnar and Otey: What did you retire?

Rizzo: I don’t know if you ever heard of it—Microsoft Office Forms Server. It was our standalone version of InfoPath Forms Services inside of SharePoint. You could take InfoPath Forms in the Office Client and automatically turn them into web-based forms inside of SharePoint. We thought customers would want to not deploy all of SharePoint and just get the forms piece. Forms Server was for that specialty forms customer. But all the customers went right to SharePoint; they didn’t want just a specialty server, so we just got rid of it.

We had some name changes as well. We renamed Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) to SharePoint Foundation. We wanted to make sure people understood that it was a foundational product for the rest of SharePoint. It’s also a platform technology so developers could get SharePoint Foundation and have pretty much the full API set of SharePoint. They could start with SharePoint Foundation and grow up to the full version of SharePoint.

Molnar and Otey: SharePoint Foundation remains free, doesn’t it?

Rizzo: Yes. It’s free. We added new SKUs to SharePoint. Some are specialty-based; some are based on introducing the FAST product line into the SharePoint family. One of the new SKUs is called SharePoint for Internet Sites, Standard Edition. This is part of the investment in the Internet business: Ttoday we have SharePoint for Internet Sites targeted at larger websites.

SharePoint for Internet Sites, Standard Edition will be targeted at the small and medium- sized website customer, someone who wants to run a website but who isn’t a billion dollar company. We have a bunch of FAST SKUs: FAST Search for SharePoint for very high-end search on your SharePoint infrastructure or a search for Internet apps.

There are probably one-and-a-half times as many products in 2010 as there were in 2007, but it makes sense when you look across the board. Another free product is SharePoint Designer. We have a new version of it. Every SharePoint customer should download and install Designer and take advantage of it.

Molnar and Otey: What’s the connection between SharePoint and Windows PowerShell?

Rizzo: I’d like your feedback on that! We’ve invested in PowerShell for SharePoint 2010. We still continue to support our old Stsadm—we’re telling people that they can continue to use it, but it will be deprecated over time. PowerShell is a lot more flexible and powerful. We’ll ship with over 350 PowerShell cmdlets in the box to make it easy for people. We’ve been hearing good feedback from our IT community. It depends on where they’ve come from.

If they’ve been in Windows Server or Exchange they’re kind of used to PowerShell. Honestly some people we’ve had to drag kicking and screaming from Stsadm over to PowerShell because Stsadm is a single command line. With PowerShell it might take 10 lines of code to do the same thing.

We think it will help in a lights-out operation scenario because PowerShell is much, much richer than our command-line Stsadm; if you don’t want to touch the server, you want to script everything, and you want reporting back and better error handling and that sort of thing, PowerShell is light-years ahead of what we have.