input:output about an information worker.

For the most part, organizations that invested in SharePoint, or had SharePoint CALs as a part of their Enterprise Agreement, were taking advantage of the Standard features of the product. Powerful, yet inexpensive, as far as enterprise content management systems go.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 CAL > SharePoint Server 2010 Standard CAL

The standard suite of tools is a pretty standard mapping, however there are additional features to be delivered in 2010 that were obviously not in the 2007 release. From my standpoint, some of the most exciting features revolve around ECM, and the inclusion of document sets and metadata management.
The document set feature allows for the management of a group of related enterprise content as a single element. Document sets support grouped version history and metadata, as well as set-based workflow. This feature will enable organizations to manage content in a more enterprise-ready fashion.

Managed metadata, on the other hand, fulfills a feature that was largely missed in the 2007 release, where the gap was filled with custom solutions and some 3rd party tools that didn’t necessarily fit the bill. Effectively, the management of metadata will allow for a collection of centrally managed terms (for both taxonomy and folksonomy) which can then be attributed to items in SharePoint (If you want to learn more about this feature, read this blog post for an excellent review). Tagging, as well, has been added to the mix, but I’m not sure if this is as popular as it was a few years ago.

Overall, many of the features that made SharePoint 2007 so popular have been improved as well, including search, making an upgrade from 2007 very attractive for many organizations.

One feature that I do want to call out that is mainly for developers and partners would be Word Automation Services. This is a feature that, as solution developer, we could have used many times over the past three years. Basically, it is an engine that enables the creation and manipulation of Microsoft Word documents on the server, from SharePoint or other business systems. For example, a use case would be the development of contracts based on data collected from lists or InfoPath forms. Granted, this is made more powerful with the Enterprise feature set (see below), but still is available in the Standard edition.

Tomorrow: Part 3, Enterprise Features.