SharePoint 2010 - Key New Features & my favourites

Here is a high level summary of the key new features of SharePoint 2010 along with my comments and favourite features in RED.

1.	A new ribbon user interface and Rich Web Editing that makes end users more productive and customization of SharePoint sites easy.
2.	Deep Office integration through social tagging, backstage integration and document life-cycle management.
3	Built-in support for rich media such as video, audio and Silverlight, making it easy to build dynamic Web sites. In plain English, it is easy to simply add videos and picture with easy editing/re-sizing capabilities within the web interface.
4.	New Web content management features with built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout, enabling anyone to access SharePoint Server sites
5.	New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, giving developers a premier experience with the tools they know and trust.
6.	Business Connectivity Services, which allow users to connect to other line-of-business data or Web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client, i.e. show data from another database within a list in SharePoint. Imagine being able to pull in data from an external database within SharePoint list without coding knowledge!
7.	Rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (REST) and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform
8.	Enterprise features in SharePoint Online such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, which make it simple to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization. The capabilities of Forms services is, in my view, the most powerful offering which mortal users without coding knowledge can make use of. Being able design rich data entry and view forms for use within SharePoint.
9.	The addition of two new SharePoint SKUs for Internet-facing sites, including an on-premises and hosted offer.
10.	Large List support! Yes, SharePoint 2010 supports extremely LARGE lists…the numbers that are being battered around are massive!   SP2010 can support something like 50 million items in a list now. You obviously do not want users to go wild and will want to control the limits via the admin settings (default: 5,000 for normal users and 20,000 for super users).
11.	3rd Party Browser support Finally users of other browsers such as Firefox etc will be able to work in the SharePoint environment using the tools of of their choice! I personally use IE8 and combined with Windows 7, is brilliant!
12.	SharePoint Workspace Ever wanted to take SharePoint workspaces/site/content offline. Well, now you can using the new client application that is SharePoint Workspaces (formerly known as Groove).

There are some other features that administrators will find really useful;

1. Visual Upgrade. This means you can upgrade from 2007 to 2010 without impacting or changing the user interface.
2. Unattached Content. Imagine the power of this!! being able to recover data from another content DB without having to recovery the whole farm. Wow!
3. Enhanced Usage reporting and logging
4. Large List throttling to maintain system performance. Mortal users will be prevented from deleting LARGE lists (millions of items) which could affect the system performance at peak times. This capability is retained with the Administrators.
5. Advanced workflow management capabilities with SharePoint Designers
6. Visio Services - Visual representation of data-linked diagrams for users without Visio
7. and more….

I am personally excited by the fact EPM2010 lives on SharePoint 2010 i.e. uses this as a platform. With the combination of the two, I am like a child eagerly waiting to open my Christmas present!

Hope this helps you in understanding the key features and aids in the decision making process for moving to SharePoint 2010. Let me know your thoughts on what your key feature are, what you think is still missing from 2010 and could be enhanced. I would be interested in hearing from you.