The only documents  out there so far are located on the SPS site on MS
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/preview/default.asp
as well as partial chm files that are included with the download.

Have you started playing with this version  yet? In your opinion, is this
version a big  learning curve from version 1? Could MS have made this
anymore difficult?

I was not able to get a copy of the Technical Bits (Beta1) so I just got
SPS v2 after Martin posted the notice. I have not had a ton of time to
start looking at it and I am hoping this weekend to start digging into
it in force. I will say that I do have a copy loaded and running,
waiting for me to get at it. I have to admit, compared to the V1 Beta
which took me a week to get running, V2 beta loaded without a hitch and
this was not on a "clean" 2003 rc2 install. I was expecting more issues
but they never showed up, so right off the bat I was somewhat impressed.
My first look at it was the install and I read some from the chm files
and it looks way different. I am intrigued by the changes I seen but I
do not have enough play time to make a valued judgment yet. It did seem
different enough that I was left wondering where this will place some of
my existing client's implementation but I think there is many things
that we can take advantage of due to the change. I would guess this is
not unlike the development side. Lots of developers knew VB6 well and
the change to VB.Net was rather large, but opened up much more to the
developers that in the end it turns out to be a big  benefit. I look
forward to anyone's opinions on the subject as well.

From my first opinion is that V2 is very different...whole another product.
GUI is very different, GUI logic and functionality logic is guite different.

Don't mention yet  technical differences....NET and SQL server.

At first sight, V2 have some learning  just because of more functionality and
different GUI logic.

Yes, the GUI is much different. Functionality seems much different. I
think there will be a fuzzy line for a lot of us between what was once
SPS and STS. Also I noticed that new SPSv2 document management is really
different. I am thinking that this will not only be a technology change
(SQL Server/.Net, clustering and farming) but a fundamental thought
process change on how we create/deploy/use/implement sps.

I got a demo of SPS v2 last week and I have to agree that it is a whole new
product. I have outlined some points below which I noted during the demo.
Obviously, this info is based on a brief demo/discussion and I haven't
actually played with the product much myself. I didn't get a demo of the new
document library unfortunately and any information on the changes there
would be great.

In my opinion SPSv2 is really a development of STS with some features of
SPS. To quote the guy who gave us the demo "SPSv2 relies heavily on Windows
Sharepoint Services (STS) and SPS becomes more a management tool for all the
team sites".
Look and feel is more along the STS route.

SQL Server replaces WSS which is a plus and document level restore is a
feature - big  thumbs up there.

SPS v2 integrates heavily with Office. For example, a user organising a
meeting in Outlook 2003 can specify that they wish to create a meeting site
- and a team site is created for them which contains agenda, objectives and
attendee web parts. Also, Word users can create a document site. Each SPS
user also has their own site called "My Site" which will list any documents
they have authored etc. Users can manage these sites and create "public" and
"private" views to control other users views of their site.

Active Directory can be indexed and is therefore searchable. User info
(extension, job title etc) from AD is displayed on individuals site.

Categories become topics and another concept called "Audiences" is a feature
(i.e. content can be targeted at a particular audience. An audience might be
an NT group for instance).

A "Sites Directory" contains a listing of all the team sites.

Web parts are to be developed in ASP.net so lots of re-development work to
keep us busy there. This was mentioned as being the biggest migration
headache.

Clustering will be available via SQL Clustering (8 node clustering will be
possible).

All management functionality will be made available via the browser - web
folders will not longer be required.

SPS v2 will be able to index SPSv1 sites and it was suggested that many
SPSv2 migrations will involve leaving documents  where they are in SPSv1 and
indexing them.

Limitations in terms of no. documents per folder etc are removed.

SPS will now integrate with MOM.

Security roles are changed - I can't recall the role titles but I think
there are about 6 of them.

So that is the info I collected. I hope it might be useful to somebody....

Does anyone have any V2 documentation? I can't find anything on
Microsoft (maybe I'm not looking in the right places) and I haven't
yet been able to load the beta to see if there is some in there.

Any other summaries similar to Katherine would also be useful.

The documentation is in the download of SPS v2 beta and on the CD. Also,
you may want to check out www.msd2d.com as there is an overview article
from Bill English there and will soon be more technical articles there
about SPS 2 and WSS.

but being pre beta and constrained by an
NDA it doesn't say that much.

There is quite a bit of info on V2 -- although still incomplete -- at
the Microsoft site. The main overview is here:

www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/preview/default.asp

And the SDK -- what there is so far -- is here:

msdn.microsoft.com/.../en-
us/spptsdk/html/SPSDKWelcome.asp

Thanks for the feedback on spsv2......