This is a live blog report from the SharePoint 2010 talks in Las Vegas. Speakers: Jim Mason, Assemble Program administrator and Tyler Butler program administrator.

Now web make pleased management is a broad platform that is about: endeavor Wikis, Divisional portals, Corporate Intranets, and Internet sites.
Areas of focus are: authoring and composition (how to get the make pleased into the system), Brand, Control (gain insight with workflow and reporting) and unified platform (for team, divisional, intranet, extranet and internet sites).

The presenters discuss the masterpage, page layouts, field controls and web parts. I will not discuss them here because I consider this common knowledge.

Demo 1: structure page authoring
The presenter shows how to make a site and a page. So far nothing new. When entering make pleased on the page, it should be noticed that the toolbar is no longer appearing at the place of the rich text box but has become part of the Ribbon which is of course far more consistent with the other Office applications.
Another thing that is reappearing everywhere is the metadata picker. A popup window that let you browse a taxonomy of keywords and even suggests keywords when you type. You can use that as a field control as well. For instance to select a Country from the Geography taxonomy.
Selecting rich media is also a lot simpler with the thumbnails for videos and pictures from your hard drive showing.
Now, the search fields are there for you so that you can add some meaning to the page like title, description and keywords. Finally the site feature fields may be used to add, tag or check your page with additional information like if it should show up on the homepage of your site.
So to wrap up, adding managed metadata and rich media are the most noticeable new features compared to SharePoint 2007.

Demo 2: community make pleased
Page rating is available as well showing you the well known (half) star ratings.
Another nice feature is the ability to add WIKI syntax as part of your make pleased. So by typing WIKI syntax in your page make pleased it will be picked up by SharePoint 2010 and translated to the appropriate format.

Demo 3: by metadata to bridge structured and unstructured make pleased
The presenter shows a make pleased by query web part that rolls up destination guides on the Adventure Works database. The CBQWP now is able to target make pleased to audiences or even data on the page like for instance the Country or language… Wow. That is called Make pleased to make pleased targeting. I always like the web part because it performs and really is reasonably useful. But now it becomes even better.
It is also no longer necessary to link the CBQWP to the custom XSL sheets for different branding. Remember my previous posts about building your intranet? You would need to export the web part, upload Xsl etc. No longer necessary! There are XSL slots that allow you to upload XSL through the browser as a property of the web part itself!

According to the presenters a lot of improvements have been made to the variations. These allow for multilingual sites. Better reliability, UI, MUI (SharePoint in multilingual interface depending on the user visiting the site) more control on making hierarchies, the option to make snapshots at a top in time and improved logging and diagnostics.

SharePoint Designer improved workflows
You can now make reusable workflows, site workflows and import / export workflows from Visio. These can then be used as publishing workflows for your site.

Insight
Insight is about getting more information about traffic and the searches performed on your site. It is also about social data, ratings and tags, health monitoring and the developer dashboard.

One of the things that I really like is that we are now able to attach host headers to site collections. Having said that, this session is over. Hopefully, you know my notes, if not, just drop a line and I will try to give some more clarification.

Check it out:Serve’s Sharepoint Blog