This is the new Windows SharePoint Services, it has the same licencing of the previous version (if you have a Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2008 and probably Windows Vista or Windows 7 licence you can use it for free).
It's not just the new version but it's also a very improved version of WSS, by the way SharePoint 2010 is supported on top of SharePoint Foundation.
SharePoint Foundation have things like:
- Blob Storage (It's possible to have data storage in and out of SharePoint Foundation)
- Rest API
- Business Connectivity Service (the new BDC) – http://blogs.msdn.com/bcs/archive/2009/10/19/overview-of-business-connectivity-services.aspx
- Health Analyzer
- Built in to Central Administration the new UI provides a analysis of Farm Health with recommended actions and best practices.
- It can handle terabytes of information
- Advanced backup,restore and disaster recovery (You have granular backup, so it's possible to get one file from a backup without creating a new environment for that backup)
- There is a new Developer Dashboard, where you can see all the db queries on the current page, the webparts that were executed on the page and a bunch of other information
The upgrade for SharePoint Foundation is easy, you can install it in a new server attach the database from WSS 3.0 and is done. After that the site administrator can make the Visual Upgrade when he want's (change the look of WSS to the new SPF look).
SharePoint Foundation is a good tool for scenarios like Team Sites, Starter Farm for SharePoint Server 2010, Development Playground (for developers)
On the end-user perspective there is some new features:
- Rich Site Editing
- The new Ribbon UI
- Office Web Apps (where you can edit pptx,docx,xlsx documents on the browser and works on IE, FireFox, Safari, and unoficially Chrome)
- Microsoft Office WebApps blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/default.aspx
- If you use skydrive, for a limited time, you can sign-up for a Technical Preview account here (if you are already a part of the technical preview, this link will generate an error): http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp=browse
- And a big news it supports WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines – http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/
The new wiki pages are wonderful, it's a normal wiki page but now we can add webparts to it. You can write text then add an image, more text, add a webpart is really amazing.
Another thing that was very annoying was the image upload, now when you want to add an image you can just selected from your disk, choose the drop point and it's done.
SharePoint blogs are now more like blogs :), you know what i mean..
About Lists, now whe can have a 1 million items per folder, and there is a new field the Multiple Columns Lookup, where you can choose to retrieve more than one field from the lookup list, and it's also possible to enforce deletion when the lookup list item is deleted.
There is also a new Create List UI, in SilverLight with a search feature.
A new very interesting feature is the Sandbox that enables users to upload solutions to there site collection, and use them only on that context without the need of IT department or Central Administration Access, it has some limitations it runs on an isolated process and has resource limitations (memory, SQL, CPU). While it does not cover the full SharePoint object model it addresses key scenarios like custom web parts and event receivers.
There are somethings the SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn't have like:
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Social Network
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Enterprise Content Types
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SharePoint Server Search
-
Profiles
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Taxonomy and MetaData
Here is the link to the SPF 2010 site – http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/related-technologies/Pages/SharePoint-Foundation-2010.aspx
