Just came back from the SharePoint 2010 Ignite course in Amsterdam. Together with 150 SharePoint experts I had the chance to discover all the new features in the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. It has been an interesting experience to see how the product is evolving to a much more mature application. Some quick random highlights:
- The architecture has changed a lot to allow a much more scalable and manageable topology. I think the disappearance of the SSP is one of the biggest changes in the product. Instead we now get a whole list of pluggable service applications. But there are a lot of other huge changes which will make our life a lot simpler: extended logging, multiple databases instead of storing everything in the content database, restoring content by using detached databases, sandboxing, …
- A lot of the problems in SP2007 have been solved. Commonly required features have been introduced. I think of the more mature ECM features (including taxonomies, tagging, rating, publishing of content types, document ID generation, document sets, document linking, …), WCM improvements (introduction of the ribbon, introduction of wiki's), …
- The UX improvements definitely will make this product easier to use.
- One major improvement is the BCS, formerly known as the Business Data Catalog. It has never been easier to import external content into SharePoint lists.
- Search...I'm sure you'll be amazed by FAST search. Visual result sets, deep refiners, contextual search, phonetic search, lemmatization, … search as it should be.
- Social improvements: I'm not convinced by the value of the social aspects introduced in this version. However, search based on social distance will most certainly improve the results even more. Mixed feelings about this.
- Excel services and the REST services: certainly something to look in to
- Powershell administration: I forgot the number, but more cmdlets than you can ever remember exist. Nothing you can't do in PowerShell.
- …
I can go on like this for hours. Time to get my hands on this and start to play with it…got the SharePoint bug J
More to come.
