SharePoint 2010 blog news

Well, we've all been waiting for SharePoint 2010 information to become public, and now that SharePoint conference '09 has started, the information is bursting out.

The first post I've found is from SharePointsolutions.com at http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/index.php/category/s... . Here's a summary of the key points:

• SP2010 provides a Chart web part, which you can hook up to SharePoint site definitions, the Business Data Catalog, excel services, or another web part. It has a lot of formatting options like you'd expect to see in Excel or a piece of dashboard software. If you're impatient I recommend checking out the chartpart on codeplex which provides some of this capability today.
• New backup and restore functionality, which the blogger discusses in terms of DR (Disaster Recovery). Restore is now more granualr and backup has more options for determining what you're backing up.
• Custom Ribbon tabs - developers can write their own "ribbon" interfaces to run inside SharePoint, just like you can in office 2007 desktop apps.
• SharePoint designer workflow user interface and functionality has been improved substantially .. now you can reuse workflows across multiple lists, and it includes a lot more standard workflow actions.
• Visio is now a workflow designer tool and includes a template and a lot of shapes for designing them. You execute these workflows in SharePoint. 
• Service applications - you can build your own "Shared Services" Application for providing functionality across web applications. I think this is going to be huge for enterprise SharePoint installations because it will facilitate integration with other apps in a much broader manner. SharePoint has basically become a real application server. 

Still waiting for the security stuff to leak out...