Whats New In SharePoint 2010 SP1

This week Microsoft had released SharePoint 2010 SP1 with pretty good number of enhancements on stability, performance, and security fronts. With SP1, there's a reason to rejoice especially for the SharePoint Admins than for the developer community, as majority of the updates are specific to administration side. While on the developer front there's not much except for the Performance Point Server, improved browser support for OWA and support for Open Document Format. Here are some of the new features shipped with SP1.

• Site Recycle Bin - Definitely a blessing to SharePoint Administrators as well as for Site Collection admins, who could now recover deleted site collections or site's without restoring the entire content database. The 'Site Recycle bin' provides the same 'Recycle bin' functionality as for Lists, Libraries and Documents.
  
  
• Shallow Copy - This feature minimizes the SharePoint admins task of moving sites from one content db to another especially with BLOBs (Binary large Objects) data. BLOB data involves files like DOC, PPT, XLS etc, which are stored external to the content database. With 'Shall Copy' the time required to migrate content databases could be significantly cut down, as the admin's only need to update references to these objects in the destination db.
  
  
• StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) - A page which was taken out from SharePoint 2010 on performance grounds. Here is a link that details on what made Microsoft to do so.  The page helps one to identify the contents(files based on size) in a site which is accessed the most. This helps one to take out contents which are no longer accessed, so as to better manage contents within the assigned quota. The good news is that SP1 is putting back the StorMan.aspx to SharePoint 2010.
  
  
• Enhanced Office Web Applications (OWA) - With SP1, interacting with online versions of Word, Excel, Power Point and OneNote through browsers like IE9 and Google Chrome has been considerably improved. Moreover support for Open Document Format too has been heightened.
  
  
• Cascading Filters - SP1 had introduced 'Cascading Filters' for Performance Point Server. This helps to eliminate the task of going through numerous items in a dashboard, by configuring dashboard filters which are connected to another. This is what 'Cascading Filters' are all about. Click here to know more on this.
  
  
• Storage enhancements - When SP2010 was released the official spec on the size of the content database was limited to 200GB. Now the bar has been raised to 1TB.
  
  
• Cumulative Updates - The SP1 comes with all cumulative updates for SharePoint 2010. So for those who are yet to update can get all this in a single go.
  
  
• RBS Provider for SP2010 - Finally Microsoft had come up with their own version of RBS BLOB Provider for SharePoint 2010. With this you could store voluminousness data outside the content database, like inside SAN/NAS boxes.

To get an complete list of fixes and improvements to existing functionality that are included in SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 SP1, you can refer to this document. By the way Microsoft had published some known issues with SP1 make sure you go through this link before going with the upgrade and finally, if you wish to view the list of product fixes shipped with SP1 click here for detailed list.