Last week, SharePoint Technical Product Manager Jie Lie announced on the SharePoint Team blog the immediate availability of the October 2009 Cumulative Update Package for WSSv3 and MOSS 2007. As with earlier updates, you must have a service pack installed prior to installing the CU.

And as before, you install the service pack (SP2) on WSS prior to installing it on MOSS, then you install the cumulative update on WSS prior to MOSS. This must be done to every server in the farm. Links to detailed instructions for deploying cumulative updates can be found on another SharePoint Team Blog post. 

We've also got all kinds of updates (of the “news” kind, not of the “patch” kind) for SharePoint 2010, starting with the announcement of the SharePoint 2010 lineup at SharePoint Connections. Now that we can talk about SP2010, we can tell you about the great sessions that Microsoft and top industry experts are presenting.

If you missed the excitement at the SharePoint Conference, this will be a great place to catch up with the most important news. And, unlike at the Microsoft conference, SharePoint Connections knows that you’re still implementing WSSv3 and MOSS 2007—there’s a great balance of bleeding edge and practical, real-world information on the conference workshop schedule. And if you haven’t begun to implement SharePoint, you should consider joining me there for my SharePoint Collaboration Jump Start on Monday the 9th.

Out on the ‘Net, there’s a lot of first-class new stuff for IT pros and developers about SharePoint 2010. Here’s a guide to some of the best news and SharePoint resources from recent days…

• Microsoft has four major web sites for SharePoint 2010:

  o The SharePoint 2010 site, where you can begin looking for all things SharePoint 2010. By the way, this site is running on Beta 1 of SharePoint 2010!  
  o The SharePoint 2010 Developer Center
  o For IT Pros, check out Microsoft's IT pro-related SharePoint site, which links to the TechNet Tech Center for SharePoint 2010
  o And the SharePoint 2010 forums at the MSDN site 

• For developers, there is a plethora of sites, some of which might be of interest to IT pros: 
 
  o The  SharePoint Products and Technologies (2010) library on MSDN 
  o Spence Harbar introduces Service Applications (the successor to Shared Service Providers--SSPs) in a detailed article on his blog 
  o Andrew Connell provides his take on Service Applications on his blog 
  o Spence also provides his always-astute perspective on SharePoint 2010 enterprise readiness 
  o The From The Field blog details the process with which you can install all SP2010 components on a single-server farm, using local (not domain) accounts—a configuration which can be very important for developers, particularly. 
  o The SharePoint Team Blog has been on fire with great articles about what’s new in 2010 for developers, how 2010 is engineered, and how 2010 is being positioned and messaged—which is actually quite important since a lot of the terminology around SharePoint will be new in 2010, with words like insights and composites becoming part of the everyday SharePoint discussion.

I look forward to seeing some of you in Vegas next week at SharePoint Connections! Until then, happy reading and patching!