Live blog report of the session: really this presentation is more about the real world examples out of the life of a SharePoint administrator. Let’s start with the architectural changes.

Shared services
The shared services have become Service Applications. Previously we had SSP that forced you to pull Search, Excel, My Sites etc from the same farm. That has changed. Now you can pick these services from different farms. Where to consume meta data from? Where to consume My Sites from? It turns SSP upside down. Also the way you turn them on has changed. You can turn them on one by one to follow a step by step migration scenario. It also allows you to delegate permissions. So a search admin does not necessarily mean he has to be a Forms admin and so on.

Search
Search is no longer a single top of failure. You can split up your index across servers. You can offload this service. The question is what really determines when to offload services. There are no best practices yet. Expect your architecture to exchange.

Office web apps
You can enable this on your existing farm or on a new farm and consume it. It enables users to view Office ID in the browser.

Claims based certification
Successor to ADFS but at the same time different. Example treatment scenario: extranets. Richer integration with Office clients.

Central Admin
There is a contextual ribbon and the GUI is much more like Windows Server 2008.

Databases
There will be many more new databases. A quick glance tells me that there will be around 11 new databases like SocialDB, SyncDB, BDC_Service_DB, Word Conversion, ManagedMetadata, Web Analytics Web Service databases etc. According to the 7 we had with SharePoint 2007 this is a lot more.

The first demo: installing SharePoint 2010
In addition to Central Admin there is a Management Console where you can run the powershell orders. During the configuration wizard there are few new things like the Farm security settings page where you’ll have to enter a passphrase which is a key to encrypt passwords in the Database. For Kerberos you’ll still have to set up the Service Principle Names.
Side kick: Reminiscence. If you used to have 4GB on your server, at least double it for a production server.
After the configuration installation finishes, it will open the Central Admin in the browser where you will questioned if you want to use the wizard for configuration. If you choose that option and just click next it will enable all services and make the additional 17 databases for you.

SharePoint Best Practice Analyzer
There are many rules that will run to check the health of your farm. You can add or exchange rules yourself. Examples: databases exist on servers running SharePoint services. Schedule: weekly, Enabled: Yes and Repair involuntarily: Yes. Rules are organized in different categories like Security, Performance etc. All stored in a SharePoint list. There are also links to sources on the Internet about issues that you will encounter. To my opinion a very nice feature of SharePoint 2010 at first glance.

Maintenance
What makes your life simpler on a daily basis? The ability to import and export in a full fidelity way. Now we can export lists in Excel. We will lose the metadata there. But now we can make packages to export site collections, sites and … lists.  Also you can now backup site collections with Central Admin, recover data from unattached make pleased databases and make a backup of the Config database.

Fact is that recovery from unattached make pleased databases is a nice go in the right direction but it doesn’t hit the nail on the head. You cannot search for site collections etc. Meaning that you will probably stick to your recovery server or use harvest like Quest Recovery administrator.

And finally, the fact that you can make and extend the powershell scripts yourself. If you need help with the scripts run get-help <word> and use wildcards. Example: get-help *remove* or get-help get-SP*.

Disaster Recovery enhancements
Just having a SQL Cluster with storage space on the SAN does really mean single top of failure. If the SAN crashes, you will lose your data. So what about mirroring? SharePoint 2010 now provides that out of the box. Take connection strings for instance. Search has hard coded connection strings. So in recovery scenarios you would had to kill the SSP to get search working again. Now, connection strings in a failover scenario are fully supported.
Take for instance SQL Aliases (SQL server1, server2). The problem with that during failover is that you would have to do a lot of manual updates to get it working again. With 2010 it is supported and automated.

Demo 2: upgrade to SharePoint 2010: Joel Olesons blog
When you take the database from 2007 and attach it on your 2010 farm it worked and the blog looked nearly the same. If you would like the new GUI you can really go to site settings, and check preview new SharePoint user experience, or just commit it without previewing. After that you will notice that your custom master pages have been replaced. You can always go in with Designer and exchange that again but make sure before you commit that you are ready. Preview, then have your binaries get working again, next the UI, CSS, masterpage etc. You will notice that the are few things that you will need to line up the new ribbon.
Side by Side upgrade (gradual) is not possible. Database upgrades can be run in parallel. On publishing sites you will have the Preview you site as part of the site actions menu.

Developer dashboard
The monitor icon on the right top page of your site does not show up on defaulting. You can turn it on by stsadm by setting a property. The dashboard will give you detailed information on your site, page and in particular the page components like performance.

Check it out:Serve’s Sharepoint Blog