Today I watched the SharePoint 2010 demo and was pleasantly surprised by the functionality and potential to help increase productivity within the corporation.  The SharePoint team seems to be messaging similarly to Aaron Fulkerson and his views on Collaborative Networks, rapid application development, and data connectivity.  There are some very good new features and updates to SharePoint that I’ll cover below. 

The Good

• Bi-Directional Data Connectivity looks promising and easier to use.  Yet any database coordinator will tell you how difficult it is to truly do this well.  One bad query can bring the entire system down.  Yet the SharePoint team was messaging around business users having the data read/write capability so the challenge is even more daunting.  
•  Composites are a welcome addition to SharePoint.  Essentially, composites are web parts and tools to help build custom applications on SharePoint.  It’s had some of them in the past, but they appear to be more streamlined and easier to create.  
• Modifying Team Sites appears to be much easier to edit and create.  Adding pictures, text and altering them seemed easy and intuitive which will increase their adoption among business users who want to create their own team pages.
• Skinning SharePoint was very impressive.  They showed an example where they used a PowerPoint template to skin SharePoint with just a few clicks.  This will add some creativity to an otherwise bland SharePoint site.  The creative types within the enterprise will enjoy this new feature and utilize it a lot – thus an increase in adoption. 

The Bad:

I don’t buy the supply chain example given in the demo.  Most companies are not going to entrust their extremely complex supply chains to a Visio document with a connection to a SQL database.   It’s much too simplistic and cheapens the demo some what.

Microsoft also tends to build applications that only work with other Microsoft products.  At least they work better with other Microsoft products.  They messaged around being browser agnostic, but I doubt SharePoint will easily work with other non-Microsoft products.  

In Summary:

The product showed well during the demo.  Who knows how much of it is real and how much of it still needs to be developed.  Tom Rizzo, Senior Director on the SharePoint team did a good job of giving the overview.  It was just enough to keep me interested, yet gave some good information to get his viewers excited about SharePoint 2010.  Hopefully more details emerge in the fall, but for now it looks promising. 

Finally, there’s nothing truly innovative here like Google Wave but it will make using SharePoint easier and provide a higher ROI due to the increased adoption and the visibility into Enterprise data.   

Questions: What do you think of SharePoint 2010?  Is it a game changer in the Enterprise?