Some thoughts on SharePoint 2010

The public beta of SharePoint 2010 is going to be available later this month. Fortunately I have got a copy of Beta 1 few weeks ago. The installation went smooth without any problem, which is good.

Here's the Central Administration site:

As you can see, the Central Administration has changed compare to SharePoint 2007. Several things that I can see in the new Central Administration site

• Configuration Wizards - There's only 1 wizard at the moment which is Farm Configuration. But I believe there will be more in beta2, or hopefully we can build a custom wizard.
  

• No more shared services provider. What's new in SharePoint 2010 is "Service Application Framework". Examples or services are People(Profile), Search, Visio Services, BDC (It's now called Business Connectivity Service)

• Ribbon is introduced in SharePoint 2010 and you can see that it is widely used even in Central Administration. Firstly I wasn't that used to the Ribbon navigation and it took me around 10 minutes to find out how to create a new web application. However as I play around with the site and I think ribbon is actually a good thing to have.

Next thing is to try out the team site in SharePoint 2010. The editing experience has dramatically changed compare to SharePoint 2007. First of all, there are so many things that you can do on the page with the new ribbon menu. One thing that I really like is the ability to change the page layout on the fly.

Another cool thing is the introduction of the "Rich Content". Within a rich content placeholder, we can free text any content, as well as adding a web part any where within the content. For example, I can add a web part between 2 paragraphs.

There are so much more in this beta version, and I can really blog on every thing. It's only a few weeks away from the public beta 2 and I am really looking forward to it.