There are three different videos - an overview, IT Pro (i.e. administrator) and Developer. All up, it is about an hour of footage.
As they stress several times in the video, this is beta so there is a good possibility that some of the details will change between now and the release. Also, Microsoft aren't saying what features will be available in the different versions of the product (WSS, SharePoint Standard, SharePoint Enterprise). They generally don't make this information available until just before the release.
Here are some of the highlights I picked up from watching the footage:
- Ability to perform an action on multiple documents at the one time (like check-out or delete)
- Many UI operations are now asynchronous, so you can get on with the next task without waiting for your last command to complete
- SharePoint gets the Ribbon - if you haven't been using Office 2007 then you are missing out on how beneficial this really is. It makes it much easier to see what you can do with whatever you are working on, such as a list item, document, text or picture. You can also turn off the Ribbon if you want to maintain the same UI as the current product
- The text formatting toolbar no longer floats AND it stays visible at the top of the page. In the current version this toolbar disappears as you scroll down through your text
- Unattached Content Database Recovery. I can't wait to try this. It should make disaster recovery a lot less of a disaster
- SharePoint Workspace - could this make Groove relevant again? It gives you the ability to take part of your site offline and sync back up when you are next connected
- Central Admin - logging to SQL AND can be extended to include your own log entries. I must admit I never did like those text files that 07 writes to. Give me SQL tables over that any day.
There's lots more of interesting content in the videos, I think the next year will be a fascinating time in the SharePoint world
