This is not just a “SharePoint Designer free” blog spam post…so please read on ;-)

First impressions of the new SharePoint 2010 sneak peak…and the new Overview Video by Tom Rizzo.

“Value Pillars”

• Connect and Empower People
  Heavily pushing on multiple devices: multiple Browers (IE, Safari, Firefox); mobile
• Cut Costs with a Unified Infrastructure
  One platform with multiple solutions
• Rapidly Respond to Business Needs
  Quickly skin SharePoint and “mash it up”…see my latest post on ASP.NET devs leveraging SharePoint

I agree with these messages as the last two are what I push daily for compelling reasons for SharePoint. The first one around multiple devices will obviously come in 2010 with more support.

Pie

  I think these are even less intuitive than the last 6, see my run down of existing Pie here:

• Sites
  Share information seamlessly and securely with employees, partners & customers
• Communities
  Empower people to work together in new ways
• Content
  Manage content from creation to disposal
• Search
  Find people and information anywhere
• Insights
  Make informed business decisions
• Composites
  Rapidly create dynamic business solutions

At least the SharePoint Pizza is directed at functionality rather than trying to make it applicable to technical features like the Pie.

Editions

At least you could talk to the editions WSS, Standard and Enterprise with the Pie, but you can’t with the Pizza. Although I think I read somewhere they’ll just be WSS and MOSS. So we’ll see.

Bite off what you can chew

I also think it is harder now to encourage people to bite off a little bit at a time…this just highlights how huge the platform is. Before I used to say, well have a project to deploy the base platform, then: “attack Search first”, or “create a portal” or “create a document management system (ECM)”. You could do these a lot easier without much overlap from other pieces of the pie. It certainly had it’s flaws though as WCM wasn’t mentioned and that was seen as a separate component. WIth the pizza, they’ve come at it with a completely different approach and it’ll be interesting to see how this changes pitching SharePoint.

Nicest new features in my opinion

• Live Editing of text on page like Office 2007
• Upload images as content is seamless
• Browser Support for Firefox and Safari
• Visio web integration
• SharePoint Designer 2010 look and feel
• Nicer BDC integration