Microsoft will ship the new SharePoint 2010 along with Office 2010 in the first half of next year (Beta – late 2009).
There has been a few questions about the name of SharePoint 2010.
Basically, we presently have three SharePoint server versions:
1. Windows SharePoint Services
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard
3. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise

From now onwards it will be just Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (without the “office”).

There has been a few name changes to SharePoint in previous years, but I wont go into that now.

Some of the main systems requirements are:
1. Requires 64bit Microsoft Windows 2008 or 64bit Microsoft Windows 2008 R2

2. This implies it requires 64 bit hardware on its environment
3. No support for Internet Explorer 6 anymore – only IE 7 and above (XHTML 1.0 compliant)
4. SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 on 64 bit

Some of the features are:

Better support for Internet facing sites
More security features & flexibility in managing permissions
Email management for users
Faster search
More storage options such as SAN, NAS, RAID etc. (currently only SQL)
Improved taxonomy management

Better Dashboards and reports
Records and archiving policies
Easy to use templates
More commands
Microsoft Groove is renamed as ‘SharePoint Workspace Manager’
Integration with other CMS products
Improved infopath form capabilities
More workflow types
Native support for Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Opera
Better support for Mobile devices
Easy migration from SPS2003 and MOSS 2007
Snapshot backup and recovery
Granular recovery at item level

In time, I will discuss migration strategies and planning your new SharePoint 2010 upgrade.
Keep updated and bookmark my site!