I attended my first SUGUK meeting on Thursday 8th Feb. Full details of the meeting can be found on the UK SharePoint user group site.

Lawrence Liu did a very frank and open discussion on MOSS, the Pain Points (it’s a much better story than 2003) and a look at the incremental changes planned for Office 14.

People are posting their feedback at
this suguk post.

The points I have taken from this are
- SharePoint v.Next will be an incremental change and will be released in 2-3 years
- Microsoft are committed to the community – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint and are now hosting a global MOSS site for the community (True dog fooding)
- Microsoft expect (and encourage) Partners to fill the gaps
- Do not delay in implementing MOSS/WSS v3 – There will be lots more information and best practice samples on route
- Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WSS V3 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=19f21e5e-b715-4f0c-b959-8c6dcbdc1057&DisplayLang=en
- Re-engineering of WSS V3 sites – This will make SharePoint Designer a really value add tool as any changes should be possible to be extracted into a true site definition.
- Microsoft are moving away from supporting the newsgroups and instead will concentrate effort on the forums

Generally I think SharePoint is a fantastic product/platform, with 2007 it has grown and with vNext it will mature further still.