If you've attended any of my talks in the last 6 months you'll likely have heard me talk about a SharePoint User Group Portal that I had been working on in conjunction with some upgrades to the Triangle .Net User Group Site. I'm happy to announce that in the next couple weeks I'm going to be offering up some earlier bits (not for production use) of this project along with a demonstration site. Additionally you'll be able to see the site in action after some time next week at http://www.trinug.org.

The following are some answers to some common questions:

What is the history behind this project:
This project was started as a one-off solution for the Raleigh .Net User Group site. As other local user groups expressed some interest in the site it has slowly morphed into reusable prepackaged solution. It has been a side project of mine for the last 6 months as I've worked towards achieving a minimum subset of requirements..

Is this project related to any other SharePoint community portal projects?
Currently No. This has been an independent project of mine from the start. There has been some very informal discussions with the contributors of other community projects about the inclusion of this project into one of the larger community projects but nothing formal has been established.

Isn't there already a User Group Portal as part of the CKS?
Yes. This solution targets a different install base. The CKS User Group Edition is a site template that is very friendly for hosted environments that do not allow local installations of custom binaries, features, and site definitions. The SharePoint User Group Portal is deployed as a SharePoint Solution Package and requires administrator access on the server. In return it contains a richer subset of features and functionality.

Speaking of Functionality what does the User Group Portal provide?
Much of the functionality for the SharePoint User Group Portal has been driven by the needs of our local user groups. Many if not all of these needs are not specific to our User Group and are shared between most user groups. A few of these include:

• Member Registration
• Meeting Management
• Local Meeting Registration and Management (Signups, Waiting Lists, etc)
• Speaker Management
• Sponsor Management
• Linking Meetings to Sponsors & Speakers
• Sponsorship Request Opportunities
• Meeting Discussion Feedback
• Meeting Resources (Downloads, slide decks etc, pictures, etc)
• Job Posting (community and sponsor)
• Member Communications (Newsletters)
• Branding\Unique Look & Feel (Themes, CSS, XSLT)
• Private Management\Leadership\planning sites

Additionally its likely that depending on the type of user group (currently SharePoint) there may be free hosting available for this solution in the near future. More to come on this very soon.

When is this going to be generally available?
Its likely that I need a couple more weeks before I start publicly releasing some early bits. Of that list above its about 90% complete. I am still working on some of the discussion and newsletter modules and fine tuning some of the branding to decouple a couple last modules from my user group specifics.

Generally speaking it won't be for general consumption for a couple weeks BUT if you are one of those folks who I've communicated with over the last few weeks look for a email very soon here on some early private releases.