New Features in Sharepoint 2010

UI Design:

• Entire interface in SharePoint 2010 to be W3C XHTML compliant
•  SharePoint 2010 "more accessible mode" to be WCAG 2.0 AA compliant
• New ribbon interface replaces toolbars and menus (and considerations for old "CustomAction" commands which may no longer work!)
• Wiki content allows web parts to be dropped in (removing over-reliance on web part zones)

Lists:

There are a whole load of new List capabilities (in addition to the "External List" that BCS brings to the plate!).

•  Lookup to Multiple

This means that when you create a new lookup column, you can now pull down additional fields from the lookup list item and use them for filtering.

•      CAML support for Joins!

You can now perform "JOIN" operations in your CAML queries for linking lists together.

•    Enforced List Relationships

You can now enforce specific relationships for lookup columns with two options:

•     Restrict Delete - cannot delete parent if child items exist.
•     Cascade Delete - If you delete the parent, all child items are automatically deleted (recycle bin aware with "restore" options!)

• Store-level enforcement

This is code level "required fields", so now you can enforce the requirements even through code !

• Unique Fields

        Specify a unique field, so that no two values can match (e.g. Email addresses in contacts list) 

•  Compound Indices

   If you want to query by 2 fields, you can now index both at once as a compound index.

•   clause for reverse lookups

This allows a CAML query to do a reverse lookup to get all child items that are associated with the parent!

• Formula based validation

e.g. Don't allow Field2 to be lower than Field1.

Workflows:

• Out of the box SharePoint 2010 workflows can now be extended in SharePoint Designer 2010.
• SharePoint Designer 2010 can be used to create "re-usable" workflows
• Site Workflows - to manage processes across an entire site.
• You can now import a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow into Visual Studio 2010!
• Import/Export workflow using Visio 2010 for visual workflow modelling. 

Content & Document Management:

• "Document Sets" allow you to treat a group of documents as a single item (with 1 version history, group executed workflow and policy, and a "download as zip" option).

•   Managed Metadata Service  allows cross-farm Content Type management and a pre-defined enterprise taxonomy structure! This is a killer-app, bringing true enterprise content management to SharePoint 2010.

• Enterprise Wiki's allow more rapid "in edit" content, as well as Web Parts deployed directly into the rich text editor (no more web part zones?).

•  Spelling check and broken link check when you "check-in" WCM pages.

Event Handlers:

Three new event handlers added

• WebAdded - Fired every time a child site is created in the web.
• ListAdded - Fired every time a list is created in the web.
• Feature Upgrading  - Fired when a feature has it's "upgrade" method called 

Security:

• Editing of ASPX pages now required "Designer" permissions (instead of contribute). 
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting) protection for pages and web parts.
• HTML pages will now "force download" by default. This stops people from uploading HTML files with malicious scripts, so if you click on an HTML file in a document library you will get a download dialog instead of the file opening in the browser!
• There are still no field level permissions

BI and Connectivity:

• New Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allows no-code connections of databases and LOB systems to content types and lists with two-way synchronisation of data  and full CRUD support.
• BCS interactivity from within Office clients, allowing LOB system data to be edited directly from desktop applications (such as Outlook and Word).
• PowerPivot for Excel allows upwards of 100 million rows into an excel workbook with phenominal performance.

Office Application Support:

• New web level services for applications (Excel / Visio with JavaScript events!)
• SharePoint Workspace to replace "Groove" for offline file support and editing.
• Office Web Applications to allow for direct opening and editing of documents from within the browser!
• InfoPath 2010 can now be used to edit the List forms out of the box!

 Databases:

• Still a 100GB "limit" for content databases.
• Still cannot have site collections spanning multiple databases.
• New support for "Failover" databases, SharePoint 2010 is now SQL mirror aware!
• All "Service Applications" have their own SQL database, along with many other new databases (e.g. Feed Activity, Social Data, Usage Logs).
• New "read only content databases" open the door for simple content deployment (utilising SQL log shipping or database replication).

Content Deployment:

• All execution now in Timer Jobs.
• Performance (and memory usage) improved.
• Export routine now creates database snapshot to improve data integrity!

 Sandboxed Solutions:

• Ability to upload WSPs directly into the content database to execute in minimal permissions using "virtual files" (no impact on the file system!)
• Resource throttling, code performance checking and "bad routine" blocking
• Provides new best practice for code development and deployment!

Search:

• New FAST search with thumbnail views (and navigation!) for office documents
• Improved relevancy and non-query searching
• 2 new search products (FAST based)
• New refinement panel for advanced sorting and filtering "on the fly"
• Multi-lingual support with over 80 languages built-in.

Social Networking:

• New My Sites structure
• Activity Feeds to provide updates on user activity with an extensible architecture!
• "Social Feedback" functions akin to Delicious and Digg allowing tagging of any URL based content, and subsequent discussions around items that have been "tagged".
• Ratings mechanism distributed throughout the product.