The United States Olympic Committee have launched a new Press Portal ready for the Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver shortly. The portal is a public web site running on SharePoint Server 2010 Beta with Silverlight serving up embedded media:

I would criticise some elements of the user interface design. Embedding external links in the top navigation bar is not a great idea (first 5 links are for within the web site, from TEAMUSA.ORG onwards are links to external web sites – different font and background colour but not obvious). The Latest News would be easier on the eye to scan if there were a thumbnail for each (instead of author which is not necessary on the home page) and a bit more space between each news item. And there are three different search boxes on the page. Would be great to see an update post-Olympics to identify which one was used the most… But I’m being picky. It’s a brave move to publish such a visible web site on beta software and the site demonstrates how much easier it is to make SharePoint 2010 not look like SharePoint. Congratulations to all involved.

For more information: Visit the USOC web site | Microsoft press release