A few very early adopters (LloydsTSB, Corgi and Ministry of Sound) have gone live with public websites using the new MS SharePoint 2007. Unlike the old SharePoint 2003 (which was very focused on document management behind the firewall) the new MOSS 2007 purports of manage website content of all stripes. I say congrats to these companies, but if you look closely you'll notice these important details:

• The customers are departmental or small organizations
• They are implemented by boutique system integrators
• Note the default /Pages/default.aspx URL - which ties them to .NET vernacular
• If you view source you should wear your Stevie Wonder glasses. Quite a mess of SharePoint-specific code and none of the sites validate very well at W3C (though to be fair, markup quality is partly an implementation issue)

As readers of the The CMS Report and Enterprise Portals Report know, ease of installation can obscure difficulty in customization and ongoing maintenance. We hear stories of other large SharePoint implementations for public sites that are requiring unexpectedly large customization efforts. Nonetheless MOSS 2007 will surely impact the market in 2007. Good luck with your projects and stay tuned! [Thanks to Microsoft blogger Mark Harrison.]