Trifecta announcements from the CKS Group
The Commity Kit for SharePoint Group (which I'm a member, but haven't participated recently, bad Bil bad) has three awesome announcements today (along with the software releases that go with them).
FBA has been available on SharePoint 2007 since the release, however it's been a little hard to implement and worst, there are no facilities for managing users or recovering passwords. No longer. With the FBA modules, you can now basically give SharePoint a DotNetNuke facelift and provide that functionality. This includes user login, membership requests and management, password management, and user and role management.
Virtual Earth Maps and the Campus Map App
When I'm at Microsoft, I would sometimes see this uber-cool app which showed the Redmond campus along with facilities, all rendering via Virtual Earth and served up in SharePoint. This app is finally released along with the source code, graciously donated by MSIT Information Services team. Very cool for those that have SharePoint setup and would like to have interactive and live maps added to their sites.
It just had to happen. FBA is nice (now with the new FBA managers) and integrated is cool, but we really want Windows Live ID integration. Here it is in all it's glory.
If there's any doubt you can't do cool things with SharePoint in the public space, take a look at CKS for ideas, inspiration, solutions, samples, and code. And get implementing!