For anybody that doesn’t know, in the UK there is a thriving user group for anybody interested in Microsoft Sharepoint.  The group can be found at www.suguk.org

In addition to the online forum there are a network of regional groups who hold regular meetings presenting and demonstrating anything relevant to Sharepoint.  I am the co-ordinator for the West Midlands branch (contact me on @steveej1 on Twitter) & we are now starting to get some well attended events – generally meeting every couple of months in Birmingham, Wolverhampton or Telford.

In our last meeting Andrew Woodward (@andrewoody on Twitter) demonstrated the features available in the forthcoming Office 365 – in addition to the Sharepoint 2010 element I was particularly impressed with the hosted version of Lync, where users have excellent messaging & collaboration features.  We also had an interesting presentation from Paul Grimley (@paulgrimley on Twitter) where he highlighted some of the issues that need to be considered when implementing Sharepoint 2010.  As a consultancy led organisation I can certainly relate ot many of these.  A copy of the slides can be found at http://www.paulgrimley.com/2011/03/sharepoint-user-group-suguk-slides.html

The Sharepoint User Group is a community led organisation and we rely on people kindly giving of their time to feed back into the community.  It would be great to hear from anybody who who be interested at presenting at a future event – whether its a short 15 minute intro to something or a full 1 hour in depth presentation.  Any subject can be considered as long as it relates to Sharepoint and it may be of interest to Sharepoint users.

The group is a really great way to share ideas & meet others who have similar interests (at least work related ones!)