SharePoint is available in three versions: Foundation, Standard and Enterprise. The college and department participants in the SharePoint 2010 evaluation recommended that ICT first install SharePoint Standard:

• Most participants had licenses which covered the Standard edition.  The increased licencing fees for Enterprise would translate into higher costs for departments.
• Unknown demand for Enterprise features - all participants identified ways to apply the features available in the Standard edition.
• A desire to keep the installation as clearly defined as possible. The university IT support teams have very limited exposure to previous SharePoint versions and will  gain valuable experience on the Standard feature set.

For your information the following summarizes features offered in the Enterprise version:

Excel Services

• Publish Excel workbooks in SharePoint as interactive reports
• View workbooks or portions of a workbook as a Web page; no need for Excel 2010 to be installed on the client computer
• PowerPivot
• Limitation: Does not support all Excel features; for example
  • VBA
  • Link to external worksheets
  • Query Tables (external data ranges) or other links to external data
  • OfficeArt objects
  • Controls
  • Protected workbooks

InfoPath Forms Services

• Can incorporate InfoPath forms to create form-based SharePoint applications, or advanced forms that connect to data in external systems.

Access Services

• Incorporate existing Access database in a SharePoint site
• Limitations
  • No VBA code supported; macros only
  • No Business Connectivity (link to external data)
  • Design edits through Access, not through SharePoint Designer
  • No action queries
  • Does not support SharePoint tools like content types, metadata

Visio Services

• Allows developers to tie Visio process diagrams to workflows.
• View Visio Data connected diagrams in SharePoint without Visio installed on the client computers
• Define interactions between the Visio diagram and other web parts on a page
• Connections to external data sources

Enterprise search features

• FAST search (this requires an additional FAST server licence)
• Contextual search based on user profile
• Rapid search on billions of documents
• Show similar results
• Show thumbnails of documents found in the search
• Tunable relevance of results (e.g. based on content freshness, authority or quality)
• Visual Best Bets
• Extract metadata from documents to improve search results and sorting capabilities
• Advanced Content Processing autocreates metadata from document contents, which is then used during searches
• Deep refinement of search results based on metadata, with counts
• Better language support
• Sorting on any property

Business IntelligenceCentre

• Site Template and Samples
• Status Indicators
• Chart Web Parts
• PowerPivot
• Decomposition tree
• Business Data Web Parts
• Dashboards and scorecards from PerformancePoint Services
  • Aggregate data from multiple sources
• Key Performance Indicators
  • Templates allow quick and easy creation of KPIs
  • Derived from multiple data sources

Business Data Integration with the Office Client

• Interact with external business data through Word, Outlook, InfoPath, Access or SharePoint Workspace