Is Sharepoint 2010 (SP2010) ready for WCM

So you've started to believe the hype??  It's true, Sharepoint 2010 is significantly different from SP2007.  There are many new features that MS lists as "Content Management Capabilities" such as:

• Metadata management across nodes in a cluster
• Better accessibility compliance management
• Media management allows better capabilities to manage rich media assets such as videos and audio
• Global taxonomy management and rich metadata management on documents
• Content organizer - automatically puts content into the right site and doc lib based on rules and metadata
• Finding/browsing for content is easier with custom filters based on metadata and pivot tables
• Enhanced editing interface via the Sharepoint Ribbon (looks suspiciously like Sitecore)
• Tighter integration into MS Office - about 1 step beyond what it was in SP2007 with the SP tools within your native Word interface

And there are lots of other tools that aren't related to WCM ONLY but more to collaboration with your workmates like enhanced workflow:

But most of these new features are for managing the documents more effectively that you used to just "store" in Sharepoint.

If you are looking for a powerful platform to build your company's website on, SP2010 is still too much like previous versions.  It's still more of an employee collaboration tool centered around Portal and document management than it is a tool for managing unstructured Web Content for easy templating, re-usability, multiple devices, multiple languages, multiple outputs.

Sure, you can build anything you need using Web Parts and .NET, however, there are other tools that have been in the WCM space for many years that have created an offering tuned specifically to the needs of Web Content Managers and website development. Even though SP2010 is being heavily marketed as a target for the WCM space, it's just not there yet.

The biggest single piece I still see missing is a way to build and deploy full site templates.  I think until they remove the Sharepoint "Shell" and just provide navigation w/o UI, it will continue to be a Portal play and not a suitable tool to create the complex, intricate and interactive UIs that our designers and customers today are demanding.

In addition, most vendor's "next generation" product releases in the WCM space (such as Sitecore, Episerver, Jahia, Day, and Tridion) are focused on either Social Media (out of the box Blogs, Comments, Ratings, Polls, RSS, shareing and embedding, integration to Social Networking sites) for end users or Online Marketing for marketing departments (campaing and promotions mgmt, form creation, lead tracking, A/B testing) or both.  Sharepoint 2010 doesn't seem to make a dent in these spaces compared to other comparable vendors.

For these reasons, we won't be recommending Sharepoint 2010 for most external websites.