Tridion 2011 provides some obvious benefits and many hidden benefits for upgrading from 2009 to 2011.  Overall it feels faster and for a very good reason-  Tridion R&D has upgraded every architecture piece in the puzzle – taking us from 2008 to 2011 in 1 upgrade. For example, we now have .NET 4.0, WCF, OData, NHibernate, Logback, Java 6, and Razor.

1.  World Server connector – If your organization uses SDL World Server for translations then the new SDL Tridion connector is for you.  Simply send the item for translation and it gets translated and automatically updated back in Tridion, triggering a possible workflow, and removing 90% of the effort of translations.  It works similar to previous SDL connectors such as SVN or Perforce.

2.  Faster and Cross-platform GUI – Better tree controls, faster GUI, and a thousand other small GUI improvements that make using Tridion 2011 a much better experience.  Use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or IE to access the GUI.  The faster the js engine, the faster Tridion will respond.  Also supports Mac!

3.  GUI Extensions – Easier to extend and customize the GUI to improve the Editors  use of Tridion.  Create new tabs on a Component Edit screen, add a new column to the main list view, add a button to the toolbar or even a whole new tab in the toolbar.  Anything is possible in the new Anguilla GUI framework – and it is all supported by SDL Tridion.  Many blog posts are written about creating a GUI extension.

4.  .NET 4.0 – TOM.NET is Read/Write from native .NET.  This means our code is faster, but more importantly, we can use language features from .NET 4.0 to simplify our code and make it more maintainable

5.  Razor Template Mediator – Not available in 2009 because it uses Microsoft’s Razor engine, only available with .NET 4.0. Download the Razor Mediator and experience the power of .NET with the simplicity of VBScript.  A major advantage when upgrading VBScript templates.

6.  Re-invented Event System – The Event System is rewritten from ground up.  Now it is possible to fire events asynchronously, during 5 phases (instead of 2), and be written in .NET 4.0.  Overall a huge improvement.  See my article about creating a first 2011 Event System.

7.  Solr Search Engine – Verity is out and Solr is in. Solr is an open-source, http-based, faceted search engine from the Apache project that is much faster and handles large indexes much better. XML.com has an intro as well as IBM having a tutorial.

8.  New Business Connector (aka Core Service) – A WCF 3.5 Web Service called the Core Service can be used to access Tridion objects from any SOAP client.  An excellent article by Bart Koopman provides some insight into the new architecture.

9.  OData Web Service – Content delivery gets a new OData web service that can be used by external data consumers for querying the Broker database.  Ryan Durkin has a nice post walking through creating an OData client.

10.  Better multimedia publishing – Choose to store multimedia files in different storage places.  Julian has a great article explaining how to do this.

Do you have another benefit for upgrading?