In my last post I mentioned I had the privilege of attending the SharePoint 2010 conference.  In this post I'd like to review the things I think were quite notable based on the sessions I attended:

• Sandboxed Solutions: I have run into a lot of clients who want to use SharePoint as their application development platform and have various groups within their organization building their own applications.  However the question that is always asked is how do we make sure that they can’t do something that brings down the entire farm.  Sandboxed solutions provide the ability to limit access to resources and isolate worker processes from the rest of the platform reducing the risk that a particular application will bring down the farm.
• Configurable Deployment: Deployment has always been big challenge and resulted in a lot of effort with SharePoint applications.  With Visual Studio 2010 there is now a series of out of the box deployment steps as well as the ability to create your own custom deployment package.  From what I have seen so far I think this is going to greatly improve SharePoint deployments.
• Branch Caching with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 and the Office Document Cache in Office 2010: These are features to improve the performance of global SharePoint deployments (ex. A centralized SharePoint Intranet being accessed from around the world.)  Office 2010 provides an Office Document Cache which basically stores documents requested for SharePoint locally on the persons computer.  Subsequent requests to the same document in SharePoint will result in a check to the server if the document as changed and if not, will serve the document from the local cache and if it has changed will send just the differences over (this is limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote).   Branch caching provides the ability to cache documents at particular locations via either a Windows Server 2008 R2 server or on local Windows 7 workstations.  Once cached subsequent requests will either go to the local Branch cache server (Windows Server 2008 R2 Box) or request the document from a local peer workstation thus reducing the need to transfer the document over long distances.
• Multilingual User Interface: This is the ability to install multiple language packs and toggle between languages on the same site.  Prior to this you would need a third party or completely custom solution to make this work and usually involved a lot of development effort.  I am not sure of all the limitations but it’s a step in the right direction.
• Social Computing:  There are a lot of features that pull in Social Computing concepts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc that should add a bunch of excitement to what is possible from a development perspective.
• Phonetic People Search: This was pretty impressive.  The demo showed the presenter misspelling a person’s name (ex. Cowfman) and it finding the person named Kauffman.  It also does the same for common nicknames.

Other notable items:

• All Search Web Parts will be open source.
• Vastly improved SharePoint Designer Workflows (particularly being able to package them into a WSP so that you can deploy the workflow to other lists and SharePoint sites).
• Very scalable farm architecture with a new concept of the Application Services Server.  You can view the architecture here.
• Integrated SharePoint support in Visual Studio IDE
• Improved Search and FAST integration

I'll dive into this in more detail in future posts as I work with some of these items.