SharePoint 2010 First Impressions

First, the high level. The first SharePoint 2010 public beta will not be released until sometime in November, and frankly, after seeing some of the application crashes today, I'm glad. In one memorable episode during the Enterprise Search Overview, the presenter went through a long, convoluted process to show how "easy" it was to create a Visual Best Bet, only to have the browser crash. On the bright side, however, there are a lot of new features that directly address many of the key pain points and opportunities that we have met over the past 3 years of SharePoint implementation. In particular:

1) A filterable metadata picker that allows users direct access to enterprise taxonomies. It appears that it will be much easier to create a filtered list of metadata values (filtered by site or library) such as we have long thought about doing programmatically. In fact, the new version may have this functionality built in.
2) The new version has built-in media streaming, which will take care of the needs we indentified during the Entergy proposal.
3) The new search has built-in faceted searching similar to Coveo, but tightly integrated into the SharePoint interface.
4) A document rating system is built-in to document libraries and the ratings become part of the relevance ranking of search results.
5) The search platform allows integration between structured and unstructured content.
6) Visio services are directly integrated into SharePoint, which allows Visio diagrams to become one option for an interface into SharePoint content. I think this will directly address an idea Jeff and I have been batting around for SharePoint interfaces. It looks like they were one step ahead of us - at least in providing the tools. Here is a description of one of the sessions dealing with this: "This session will drill down into ways that you can create and integrate Visio visualizations inside of SharePoint using Visio Services. Learn how to use Visio Services to complement existing SharePoint Business Intelligence applications in creative ways. We will also cover all of the complimentary technologies on the server such as the JavaScript API and custom data sources."

Those are some of the first day highlights. I'm going into detail in the following three blog posts for each of the sessions I attended today.