So, I spent the week messing around with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and I'll have to say, I'm really impressed.

Installation: I got it up and running on a VMWare virtual Win 2003 server on my development machine here at work.  Setup was easy and straightforward.  I spent around three hours swapping various disks, etc.  Overall pretty painless.

Creation of Portal Web Part.  I created the following Web Part in about 2 and 1/2 days, re-using our back-end VIT framework here for managing container statuses:

The development process was what I expected, and was a breeze.  Anyone familiar with creating ASP.NET Custom controls will have no problem.  Good documentation from MS helped, and installation worked like the docs said.

I then spent some time setting up a bug tracking web part, basing it on the out-of-the box portal list part.  That was really cool!  I created a pretty full-featured bug tracking app in about 30 minutes!  The guy that sits next to me was laughing because I just kept saying WOW!   This is really cool!

Now, I'm not sure how long this honeymoon period will last, but I'm pretty psyched about it so far!

-Brendan