I'm very excited to announce the formal kick-off meeting of TRINUG's SharePoint Special Focus Group next month on June 24th. In this monthly special focus group we will be emphasizing the developer aspects of SharePoint but any and all topics in SharePoint and related technologies will be fair game.  From time to time I plan to have some scheduled speakers, including SharePoint MVPs drop by to give us some out of town perspectives on SharePoint topics. This will be a very interactive and social event. Bring your ideas, thoughts, questions along with you. This is open to all who have an interest in learning more about SharePoint whether you've been working with it for years, just got it thrown on your lap, or you're just curious about what the buzz is all about.

In this first session we're going to be covering the basics of Features. Features, although poorly named, are one of the basic building blocks of SharePoint and are essential for provisioning functionality in your site.  Without a solid understanding of Features you'll never move past SharePoint Designer for developing robust, reusable, and arguably more interesting SharePoint components.

I would like to give a special thanks out to Mark Weinburg over at Tek Systems for providing the facilities for this event. I walked through the conference room the other day and its going to be a great location for the meeting!

Because of the level of interest that has been expressed in the last few months we will be requiring registration for this first event to make sure we don't go over capacity. Registration should be setup at http://www.trinug.org in the next couple days and we'll provide additional information such as time and driving directions. Seating will be limited to 30. In all honesty I'm not expecting that many folks and I like to keep the group small and interactive but if we do have more folks then that I'll start working on some different outlets for the SharePoint community in Raleigh.

Drop me some comments if you have some ideas on topics you'd like to see or general questions\feedback. I look forward to seeing you all!