Top Ten SharePoint Server 2010 Features
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 has a host of new features, so it's a challenge to zero in on which are the most important enhancements to the product. This list is based on the needs of our customers and our experience with SharePoint over the last ten years.
1. Programmability: SharePoint Server 2010 is better integrated with Visual Studio, significantly enhancing the user experience for developers.
2. Social Networking: New social networking features allow integration with social networks, such as creating and aggregating social tags, ratings and comments. The Social Statistics Web Part illustrates these new capabilities.
3. Document Sets: This new feature allows users to manage a group of documents rather than one document at a time. For instance, metadata can be applied to a group of documents, and versioning can be applied to the document set.
4. Records Management: New options for records management have been added to SharePoint 2010, including the ability to manage documents in place rather than move to an archive location.
5. Browser Compatibility: Microsoft has improved compatibility with Firefox 3.x and Safari on non-Windows operating systems.
6. The Ribbon: SharePoint now sports the Fluent UI, a ribbon tool to simplify access to commands, making it more consistent with the other parts of Office.
7. Sandboxes and Resource Throttling: Administrators can restrict the resources consumed by SharePoint and define boundaries for SharePoint solutions.
8. Visio Services: The Visio digramming tool now runs inside SharePoint to simplify creation of diagrams and dashboards.
9. Health Analyzer: SharePoint monitors the health of the server farm and can find and fix many of the problems you may encounter.
10. Smooth Upgrade: Microsoft has taken pains to make upgrading to SharePoint 2010 simpler than the transition from SharePoint 2003 to 2007. Visual Upgrade gives you the flexibility of when to change the look and feel of your SharePoint sites.
For a complete list of what's new, see Microsoft MSDN and the SharePoint 2010 site.