Review of Out of the Box SharePoint 2010

First and foremost, ftom the UI side this is just SharePoint 2007 trying to look more like Facebook or Flickr. The UI now uses a number of new AJAX and other Web 2.0 interfaces. So if you are a old hand at SharePoint 2007 there is very little to learn. For a new users it might be a bit easier to learn.

Actually the experience that is going to help the most would be going from Office 2003 to Office 2007. SharePoint 2010 will only run in IE versions above 6 and need JavaScript. This gives you the ability to add, out of the box, is a lot more user functions. In line editing adds a lot. But things like calculated fields are just as ugly as ever.

Beyond the interface there is not much new to SharePoint 2010 UI. The have added more records management features up front like holds and locations. But overall working with the logic and limits of SharePoint list is just as frustrating as ever. Most features seem to be the same.

But the new UI will make selling this to your CIO or business much easier. It gives you a lot more good Web 2.0 UI and Web 2.0 like eBay, Google Docs, MySpace, and Flickr. The new ribbon control makes it much easier to find the SharePoint features. I always hated the fact that service features in 2007 seem almost randomly arrayed in the menu items.