Where is ComminityServer heading? More specifically this post only discusses the main CommunityServer product, not Evolution its bolt-on cousin for Microsoft SharePoint.

This discussion references the following CommunityServer post. The CommunityServer Roadmap Readme (PDF) can be downloaded here.

The currently published CS roadmap is just a menu of general direction which no doubt will adapt and change in reaction to development progress and more usually what (new or big) customers are actually asking for. Nothing wrong with that. A large customer such as Dell, intel, Facebook or Microsoft driving the CS technology in a specific direction will generally mean good news for most customers. If you don't need a feature, don't use it.

What we have now: CS2008.5 SP1

Reliable, robust. Improved performance. Some SEO sitemap issues.

This release introduced and completed a number of interesting features which we’re yet to see our customers implement in detail. The two big additions we highlight are:

Wikis: Allowing a Community to grow their own mini-wiki to describe their terminology and industry terms. Our customer BioDieselNow.com is just starting to use this pending the addition of more content. We did consider offering this to another customer emrupdate.com but are concerned at the possible controversial entries that would be created pro or against various EMR initiatives. E.g. Anti-CCHIT or e-Prescribing.

Groups: A Community can be seen as a broad collection of members, but with specialists and enthusiasts for certain subjects within that community. A simple analogy would be American Football Community with Groups for specific teams. A Group formed for the LA Lakers could be customized to include their livery, next fixtures, Lakers Store link and featured interviews. We think Groups probably grew to support Facebook where a user may have membership of many groups. Of course very special to Social Networking sites. To date we’ve not seen a parallel for the traditional communities that we’re managing or those of our customers.

Of course there are other ways to manage a users’ interest in a specific subject either by a dedicated forum/blog or by a Tag or registering their interest via an extension to user profile.

What’s around the corner: CS2009 Q1 2009

Headline: Updates to Profile and Friends

These feel like more Social Networking must-haves but could be useful for new Communities to create their social groupings. As this is implemented automatically within CS2008, we’ve seen only infrequent take-up of the Friends approach. Simply explained as allowing you to see what your friends are posting and commenting upon. Within an already established Community these users are already watching out for their regular posters and jousting partners.

Headline: Supersized Groups. Again Social Networking oriented but clearly useful to your large Facebook Community.

Headline: Publishing Workflows. No insight into this except predicting that you can determine a publishing route for content via a number of proof-readers and authors. Similar functionality in Microsoft SharePoint. I can see some use for that when helping new (blog) authors manage their posts to publication. But I wonder, does anyone really, really care about the odd typo or repeated word word.

Headline: App Page Templates. No idea. Maybe a post template from which you could author a post. Sure, quicker than cut ‘n paste.

Next Year: CS2009 Q2 2009 

Headline: Ideas 1.0. This is a clever concept allowing the Community user to float an idea and for members to promote or demote that idea. There's a working demo here.

Headline: Events 1.0. No real information. Suspect this is creating events when certain things happen, such as, new user, create welcome email.

Headline: Search Updates. CommunityServer maintains its own search barrel of words allowing a fairly basic search for content stored in your forum. It's OK but for any real challenging search with proximity or exact phrase most of use head over to google add add site: sitename to really find what we're after. Of course Search is still required if the site is intranet or internal to a company.

Headline: Public Feed Aggregator. I guess similar to the functions offered by BlogBlaster providing statistics and heuristics for how your RSS feeds are being used.

Nick Harrington
team ambay software