As a software engineer, when I define a new piece of software I like to start with a list of features and then drill down into requirements.  Microsoft starts with “capabilities” and then drills down into features.  So let’s go through the capabilities first:

• Sites: SharePoint 2010 Sites provides a single infrastructure for all your business Web sites. Share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.
• Composites: SharePoint 2010 Composites offers tools and components for creating do-it-yourself business solutions. Build no-code solutions to rapidly respond to business needs.
• Insights: SharePoint 2010 Insights gives everyone access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications. Help people locate the information they need to make good decisions.
• Communities: SharePoint 2010 Communities delivers great collaboration tools—and a single platform to manage them. Make it easy for people to share ideas and work together the way they want.
• Content: SharePoint 2010 Content makes content management easy. Set up compliance measures ”behind the scenes”—with features like document types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting—and then let people work naturally in Microsoft Office.
• Search: SharePoint 2010 Search cuts through the clutter. A unique combination of relevance, refinement, and social cues helps people find the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.

Let us top this off with the nice Microsoft graphic 🙂

Okay, now we’re ready for some features.  You may be asking yourself, “Why do I care how Microsoft organizes features?”.  Because, that is how all of Microsoft views the product!!!  This will help you so much in navigating MSDN, TechNet, and all the other wonderful MS resources out there.  Plus, I don’t have proof, but this is most likely how the original team that developed SharePoint 2010 envisioned the product.  Finally, when talking to a customer you need to map their requirements to SharePoint features.

Features by Capability

• Sites
  • Out-of-the-Box Web Parts
  • SharePoint Health Analyzer
  • SharePoint Ribbon
  • Visual Upgrade
  • Web Parts
• Composites
  • Access Services: Publish Access databases in SharePoint.
  • Business Connectivity Services (formerly Business Data Catalog)
  • Silverlight Web Part
• Insights
  • Dashboards
  • Decomposition Tree: Perform root cause analyses using powerful analytics to examine core data. View only the most pertinent information using the new Decomposition Tree.
• Communities
  • My Profile: Learn more about your colleagues with Profile pages. The My Profile page contains information about employees, including biographies, job titles, location, contact information, interests and skills, and previous projects.
  • Tags: Classify and organize large amounts of information in your company by applying tags. Use standardized taxonomy tags defined by the organization and informal social tags defined by employees.
• Content
  • Compliance Everywhere: Manage versions, apply retention schedules, declare records, and place legal holds, whether you’re dealing with traditional content, Web content, or social content.
  • Document Sets: Create a Document Set to manage related content as a single entity, speeding up common processes like RFP responses.
• Search
  • Metadata-driven Refinement
  • People and Expertise Search

You can get more info on features here.

This is, of course, not the whole story; so I’ll be adding to this post as time goes on.