Yesterday I listened to two sessions regarding Administration in SharePoint 2010 with the MVP’s Shane Young and Todd Klindt on the SharePoint Conference 2009.
To highlight some of topics that were discussed the most important was: Learn PowerShell! This is actually something that goes like red thread through all IT-Pro Sessions. With PowerShell you will be able to do more or less everything. In the Beta in November they will ship more then 500 different PowerShell commandlets.

Another big change in the infrastructure is the Service Applications. Basically this is the new SSP but it works completely different. The SSP as you might know is a couple of “boxed” services that is consumed by all Web Applications in the Farm. With Service Application they have not only added and divided some of the existing Shared Service Provider Service (they actually have approx. 20 different Application Services right now) bu they have made it really flexible. You can turn them on and off on each Web Application Level, you can assign them to different Application Pools for Isolations and they are all handled from the Central Administration (or from PowerShell of course).
You can also delegate the permissions for handling the Service Applications. By doing that you can have different departments that manages for instance the Search. What they then do is that they log on to the Central Administration and all they will see is their Service Application.
You will also be able to publish the Service Application to different farms or build your own.

One of the Service Applications that gave applauds was the Managed Metadata Service that finally makes it easy to publish metadata across site collection, web apps and even reuse it between farms!

When it comes to the Central Administration they have changed it to useRibbons as everything else within 2010. Everyone familiar with the current CA, like me, will probably have some difficulties finding things but I think we will after a while get a much better user experience.

The Last thing I would like to highlight from the session is new backup possibilities. You are actually now able to do granular backups direct from CA and down to list level. But theabsolute best around backup is how you can take a content database that is not attached to the farm, for instance a backup of the content DB and browse through it and get a backup from that. Today you need to attach this DB to a Maint farm with the same patch level, export and import but this is just such a great feature. Well done and thanks MS!

Below are some Pictures from the sessions.