SharePoint 2010 New IT Pro information

It's possible you already saw these new features and information somewhere on the net but just to be sure I will reproduce some of the information I wrote down during the TechEd sessions I visited today.

General:
* SharePoint 2010 will be 64 bit only and it will only work with a SQL Server 64 bit version as well. There are a lot of good architectural reasons why Microsoft made this decision as they didn't want to put there clients in a position where the software is slow because of 32 bit.
* There will be no IE 6 support.
* SharePoint 2007 SP2 included this 'Pre upgrade checker' which, based on rules, checks the readiness of your infrastructure. These rules are extendable allowing it to be customized by you.
* To make the installation more easy you now have a system preparation tool which will install all the stuff SharePoint 2010 relies on. This includes things like .NET, Geneva, ... .
* The complete installation process is scriptable user PowerShell. There are more than 600 commandlets you can use.
* Using policies, system admins can specify on which computer SharePoint can be installed. As it is now also possible to install it on Windows 7, it's more likely that none official installations will occur. This can be prohibited and controlled using these policies.
* In the Central Administration you now have the configuration wizard which allows you to choose what parts you want to install and it will guide you through the whole process.

Upgrading:
* You can do an inplace upgrade where you install SharePoint 2010 over 2007. An upgrade of the binaries is done.
* You can do a database attach and upgrade (this is necessary if you switch hardware).
* There will be no gradual upgrade available.
* Parallel database upgrading is possible.
* The logging is much more cleaner. In the past you would have these huge files with a lot of unreadable data. You still have access to these but also to more cleaner logging information and progress reporting which tells you what went wrong and how you should fix it.
* Visual upgrade allows you to switch between the 2010 and 2007 UI's. So although the underlaying system is 2010, you're users will not notice this. Notice that this is not a long term upgrade solution.

Management improvements:
* You can delegate parts of permissions to, for example, hosting admins.
* There is a strong focus on hosting SharePoint (SharePoint online).
* SharePoint Health Analyser tracks common problems and tells you how to fix them. Problems are alerted to the admin. Again, these rules are extendable.
* SharePoint controls its own password policies so the system will not stop working because somewhere a password expired.
* There are a lot of preconfigured health rules which check all kinds of different important settings. These are extendable.

PowerShell:
* There are 652 SharePoint commandlets to use.
* Everything is extendable.
* stsadm is still available.
* PowerShell though, for some operations (enumerations) is 5 to 10 times faster than stsadm.
* It allows you to remotely control your SharePoint environment. No RDP needed anymore.

Analytics:
* New unified logging database which tells you who used which feature at what time.
* OOB reports.
* Developer dashboard is accessible for developers on each page and gives a complete overview of what stored procedure, function, ... took how long to complete.

Scalability:
* List views which contain more than 5000 items will be automatically blocked. The user gets some kind of error message telling him too many items are being returned and he should filter the information. This is a huge advantage as before SharePoint would actually load all this information, SQL Server would get overloaded and the whole system would get slow.
* A user can no filter or navigate by metadata. This is really a cool new feature. The user will see all the metadata he can filter on in a tree on the left and really find those couple of items he really needs. The demo that was given was a library containing just over a million documents with metadata.
* You can throttle resources per site collection.
* Developers can create sandbox solutions, which they can upload in the site collection. The system admin can limit the resources and the sandbox solution will be killed instantly if it crosses the resource limit boundaries.

New architecture:
* Shared Service Providers are gone.
* There is now a new services architecture where admins select only the services they need.

Patching:
* Different build versions are possible so you're WFE can have version N+1 when your database has version N. This allows you to do your patching in a bigger timeframe.
* In the admin UI you can set settings to mirror the content database.

Content storage:
* The is a new client/server file IO protocol which allows you to work with data in different ways:
    - cached
    - differential
    - chunking
* Remote and external BLOB storage.

I hope this was enough information for you :). More will come tomorrow.