After several weeks of "lurking" on this list while we bring up SharePoint,
I am emboldened by the kindness so often shown here to ask for help. Please
bear with me if this gets long...

We are bringing up SPS/MySites for all students, faculty and staff at
Washington State University for Fall Semester, 2006 (which begins in 18 days
<gulp>). We are providing templates for subsites of MySites that can be
used as electronic portfolios. We would like those templates to be
available in the list of templates when users create subsites of their
MySites.

We know how to do this with STSADM from the command-line. However, it would
be much more convenient if the template designer didn't have to get the
server admin to install the templates.

We thought we found the solution in the top-level Site Template Gallery. As
a portal admin, I can use the Web GUI to upload a template to the top-level
Site Template Gallery, then go to MySite, create a subsite, and the template
I uploaded is available in the template list.

However, other users cannot see this template! Only if it is installed with
STSADM is it available in the list for all users.

There don't seem to be any permissions controls on the top-level Site
Template Gallery, or on each template, that would explain this behavior.

How is the top-level Site Template Gallery supposed to work? Is there a way
to use the Web to install site templates that are available for creation of
MySite subsites?