I don't know about everyone else, but getting everyone in a large guild (over 100 members) to regularly update their character profiles is like herding cats.

Blizzard have just brought out a beta website called The Armory in which you can search for individual character's across all servers. It brings up the normal character info (character sheet, rep, skills and talents).

http://armory.wow-europe.com/

This clearly isn't a replacement for Roster as it doesn't give the rest of the detailed info. However, it would be great to have an addon which is able to bring this page up for each guild member so at least you always have the basics. Not sure if Blizz will make it possible to drive an external search of this site, but maybe something is possible.

There is already a topic on this:

http://www.wowroster.net/Forums/viewtopic/t=2924.html

PleegWat wrote:This morning (~4 hours ago) I took a look at that too. It runs completely on javascript, with a couple of xml feeds. I've confirmed there is no referrer checking on those feeds, so we can use them to pull roster data.

We're definitely gonna use that in R2. I'll see what I can do in an addon for roster 1x.