I just watched the new Sneak Peek videos on the SharePoint website and can highly recommend taking the time to do so (takes about an hour or so for all three combined).

 

 

While I am probably not the biggest fan of the Ribbon that was first introduced in the Office 2007 desktop apps, I have to admit that having that functionality in a browser-based solution looks really slick! Even more important though is that this significantly reduces the click distance for any task in SharePoint and makes the whole solution much more attractive, both objectively and subjectively.

 

I think that Microsoft is on to another very smart move here also: Silverlight (and AJAX), now being an integral part of any SharePoint installation, will help to rapidly increase the installed base of Silverlight.

 

I wrote several in-depth articles on the SharePoint 2007 release when it first came out and can't wait to also get my hands on a copy of the 2010 release for testing. When I do, I'll report back here with my findings.