Now that our Internet facing “dogfood” infrastructure has been upgraded to WSS 3.0, I can finally launch to the SharePoint Community Champions team site. The URL is http://sharepointchamps.officeisp.net. I am very disappointed (mostly in myself) that it has taken almost 4 months since I had posted this teaser blog entry to get the program kicked off. Those of you, who had sent me “membership request” e-mails in the past, should be receiving autogenerated e-mails with your login credentials from the team site very soon.

   The team site not only provides a resource for the Champs to collaborate on ideas and initiatives that will grow and advance the SharePoint community, but it acts as an ideal test bed for how an online community site with both public and private areas can be effectively implemented and maintained with WSS 3.0. For starters, I created a root site and enabled it for Anonymous Access and then created three SharePoint Groups -- 1) SharePoint Community Champions, 2) SharePoint MVPs, and 3) Microsoft Employees – with the first two having Read permissions and the third having Contribute permissions as shown below. I also changed the site theme from Default to Verdant so that the site would be visually distinctive from the private subsite that I would create next.