I recently had the good fortune to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, which outlined the new features in SharePoint 2010.  Below are some of the things I took away.  I think this will be a huge improvement over the current version, and will offer a lot of very compelling new features, and a lot of good reasons to make the upgrade.

General Comments

The Beta will be released in November.  Final product will be released in the first half of 2010.

Microsoft is focusing on making the upgrade and updates easier.  You can upgrade the back end, while still keeping the master pages (look and feel of sites) the same.  Then you can upgrade the master page at the site level to test and get all of the new features.

Everything is 64 bit.  It requires SQL 2005 / 2008 64-bit, and Windows 2008 64-bit.  The server must have at least 4 GB of RAM.

A level 1 browser is required for users (IE 7 or 8, or FireFox 3) plus SilverLight for the best experience.

WSS is now called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, and is still free.  SharePoint Designer is still free.  SharePoint Server still has Standard and Enterprise CALs.

There’s a limitation on data storage now if you don’t have SQL… The basic install uses SQL Express now (rather than Windows Internal Database in the old version), which has a 4 GB data limit.  So we should keep this in mind for small projects, and typically recommend SQL Server.

SharePoint has emerged as an entire platform, and Microsoft believes this will bring ECM to the masses, BI to the masses, etc.  Microsoft is also positioning this as a full featured internet-facing platform, as well as an intranet / extranet portal which 2007 was though of.

SharePoint should be evaluated along with Office 2010, since the integration is now extremely tight.  SharePoint can be the access point for all of the firm information.

The most impressive things I saw in 2010 were the workflow enhancements in 2010 and the Office web applications.  In many instances I couldn’t tell whether they were demoing things in the rich Office client or in the Office web app—the user experience is almost identical in either case!
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