So what's new in SharePoint 2010 anyway? Microsoft has a library of documentation on this topic, but I thought to pull out the obvious winners. So here is my refined list of new features in SharePoint 2010 that did not exist in 2007. My list will focus on sites, communities, content, search, insights, composites, and office 2010 integration.

Sites:

Line-Of-Business Integration with read/write capabilities.

Enterprise Management Operations offers Web Analytics that provides you with traffic reports, search reports, and inventory reports.

Mobile Connectivity in SharePoint 2010 makes it easy to work on the go with full-fidelity viewing and providing editing capabilities.

A more robust user experience with the aid of the contextual Ribbon and Microsoft Silverlight.

Office Web Applications allow you to view and edit Office documents directly in the browser.

Many of my clients have been through several iterations of improvements and refinements to their enterprise portal / corporate intranet environments to include portal personalization and customization, improved content management integration and content authoring, and basic search.  In fact these features are now considered to be “Phase One” items on new implementations as well.

What is emerging now is the expansion of these portals / intranets to include a truly integrated enterprise search.  Vendors such as Vivisimo (Velocity), Google (Google Search Appliance), and Microsoft (FAST) provide search engines that provide an extended reach beyond portal and content managed information to include data from enterprise systems such as PeopleSoft, SAP, and Cognos, etc.  These systems can be searched via vendor specific connector technologies, which is typically accomplished through a customized API and an extension to an organization's services tier.  These search vendors also provide information optimization capabilities such as faceted results (categories), user tagging, and relevance rating, etc.

Recently I oversaw an internal development effort to integrate Vivisimo's Velocity search engine into Microsoft SharePoint and JBoss Portal.  CapTech has experience with several search products and many have the same integration challenges.  We found that Velocity's architecture simplifies or eliminates many of these challenges.  Here are just a few great features that we leveraged in this project.