What to expect in CS 2008.1 this fall
I'm sure a bunch of you just got done installing CS 2008 or upgrading to SP1 for CS 2008, but I want to give you the lowdown on what you can expect this fall with the release of CS 2008.1.
Schedule
The first thing you'll notice is that I said "fall 08" and not "spring 09". Yes, we're going to be speeding up the release rate of Community Server. Expect 3-4 releases per year and also expect that service packs become strictly focused on bug fixes rather than features. I'm going to label to the target of CS 2008.1 as September. Expect a beta within 2 months.
Evolution
"Evolution" is the name being given to a new version of Community Server. This version is being built for use as an intranet solution. Evolution, although based on core Community Server functionality, will include extras meant for usage behind the firewall like Sharepoint, Active Directory, & Exchange integration. Evolution releases will generally ship after CS releases, but this post isn't about Evolution. :-)
Wikis
CS 2008.1 will ship with support for Wikis. No this is NOT the same wiki engine you may have seen on http://wiki.asp.net. Wikis, in Community Server, will feature pages with revision history, tags, ratings, comments, easy linking/ page stubbing, wysiwyg editing, and a couple of surprises for good measure.
I will say that our target scenario for Wikis is collaborative documentation. This isn't to say you can't use it for anything, but we're really going to help out people looking to build documentation, tutorials, FAQ, etc out collaboratively.
Forum Questions & Answers
I know, if you read my blog then you know we support this already... but not well. We're improving everything from how you can set up support communities all the way down to the workflow & theme of QnA threads.
Default Site Avatars
I've jokingly called the work we've done with Avatars my "No more Rob's" campaign. In CS 2008.1 site administrators will have the ability to upload a set of "Site Avatars" that users can select from. This will be an option to enable or disable just like remote or user uploaded avatars. We've also added the ability for admins to pick a new default avatar in the control panel for users that don't choose/upload their own. Finally I'm really happy with some of the updates we've made to the users avatar selection experience. It's a small bit of functionality, but something a huge percentage of users will go through.
The Devils in the Details
Similar to cleaning up the user avatar experience there are a lot of small things we are doing to make the administrator and normal user's life better. If we do it right then these are the sort of things you don't notice outside of being less frustrated and discovering "hidden features" that we've buried deep within the product. These changes range from something like making the administration UI easier to navigate to letting you add multiple users to groups at one time.
Similar Posts
- Locking Down Community Server 2008.1
- Creating a New Breed of PMs at Telligent
- OCS 2007 Breakout - Social Media
-
The last couple of weeks have been very busy and very different for me. Two weeks ago today I relinquished
-
The last couple of weeks have been very busy and very different for me. Two weeks ago today I relinquished
Comments
Ryan on on 7.07.2008 at 1:08 PM
Thank you very much for posting this. I'm really happy to hear some improvements on the QnA side as well as the fact I won't have to postpone my project in order to get them. Any further details you could provide on the changes that might help my planning would be greatly appreciated!
afscrome on on 7.07.2008 at 1:10 PM
Those changes look brilliant, but I'm going to put my two pennies worth in as to what else you could improve -
I thought I read somewhere that we'll be seeing Conversation read/unread functionality. Is this still coming or did it just slip your mind?
For the improved Question / Answer functionality, can you modify the points module to assign points to a user for every post they make that's marked as an answer.
And as a suggestion to further your "No more Robs" campaign, maybe you could automatically assign new users a random avatar from the gallery.
If you're really passionate about your campaign, and want to go that extra mile, why not apply the random avatar retrospectively ;)
A few more suggestions I have
* can we see the post rating control, and "Edit this post" link returned to the post.aspx page in the Hawaii theme.
* Can you improve the out of the box Active Topics page - something more like what I've done at wiirate.co.uk/.../topicsactive.as (If you want the code, send me an email and I'll give it to you)
* CS has a brilliant feature which allows you to hide those forums you don't like. Make this more visible
Rich Mercer on on 7.07.2008 at 1:36 PM
After playing with some of these features internally recently, I can't wait until we can release them to the world. :)
Josh Ledgard on on 7.07.2008 at 2:05 PM
@Ryan - Thanks!
@AFSCrome - This post was about bigger changes, but there are a LOT of small things I can put in future posts. To answer your questions quickly...
Read/Unread conversations was checked in a while back and working fine. You also get unread count notification in themes in the welcome area.
Posts marked as the answer will have points associated with them that you can modify to be given to the answerer & the person that marked it.
I've thought about random avatar... we'll see. :-)
Edit This post was returned to the blog themes.
Unhiding features is a big priority of mine... I have a truckload of them and we won't get to all of them this release, but I'll look at that one.
Your active topics idea is a good one. I'll give that a deeper look. No promises.
Ryan on on 7.07.2008 at 2:08 PM
I'll second afscrome's comment on rewarding users for having the response that is "marked as answer". I'd love to see separately configurable point amounts for answers, other responses, and for the people who posted the question in the first place. Those who start conversations should get rewarded just like those that take the time to come up with an answer.
Eric Falsken on on 7.07.2008 at 3:01 PM
Since i'm in the middle of reworking the cs-wiki project, I'm interested in opportunities to collaborate or work together on this part of CS. Or at least to hear more about the requirements/goals of the project. Is there someone I can speak to about it?
afscrome on on 7.07.2008 at 3:17 PM
@Josh
Glad to hear that - it looks like you're leaving no stone unturned.
Just to provide a bit more about what I meant about the active topics, I was hoping it would look a bit more like forum.snitz.com/.../active.asp however the link I provided above is very limited as my website doesn't have many posts
Leo on on 7.07.2008 at 10:37 PM
Is there any chance Telligent will release a road map of sorts for the planned releases in the CS 2008.x series?
Also, whatever happened to some of the hack-a-thon entries? Are they not being released to the public?
David R on on 7.08.2008 at 9:31 AM
I echo asfcrome's suggestion on the active topics page. Active topics (like on Snitz) is much more usable grouped by forum opposed to 1 long list of topics. My plan is to base a new page off filteredthreadlist.aspx, maybe filteredgroupedthreadlist.aspx, that will allow each of the ThreadLists (active,unread, myposts etc) to be grouped by forum, then give the user a profile property to allow them to chose grouped view or standard view.
Are there any plans for improving the search functionality 'out of the box' in CS2008.1? CS has surely the most powerful search available in any forum software but is let down dramatically by the UI controls. All it needs is the ability to search within chosen forums (from the search page). This functionality was in CS2.1 but removed from CS2007.
Josh Ledgard on on 7.08.2008 at 11:30 AM
@David: There are plans to greatly improve search, but it probably won't happen until CS 2009 (Winter 09). That's the next release.
@Leo: Roadmap. We're working on a public roadmap. You'll be happy to know there IS a roadmap... which is sort of a first step. :-)
@Eric: You can talk with me.
Robert McLaws on on 7.08.2008 at 5:06 PM
I'm glad you guys are working on the Avatars functionality. It has been severely lacking for quite some time. Are you guys going to be leveraging the Media Gallery backend for processing, so that we can have more elegant resizing support? You have no idea the frustrations we've been through doing theme design, only to have clients get pissed when people who upload smaller images break the design.
Thanks!
David on on 7.09.2008 at 5:09 AM
Re Search in CS2009! I'd love to understand how you prioritise work on CS at telligent, default site avatars over a usable search page??
All you need to do to the search page to make it more usable is add an multi-line dropdownlist to the page to allow users to select specific blogs/forums etc, this would replace the treeview you removed post CS2.1. Come on, it doesn't take 18 months to do that!
josh ledgard on on 7.09.2008 at 12:21 PM
@ Robert: The resizing of Avatars is now using the same techniques used in media gallery. They look MUCH better now.
@ David: I'll clarify, there are multiple search work items going on. The longer search item is around making the search engine better with things like improved search on users & other meta-data as well as improved relavency by not showing you the same thread from 20 posts. Something simple, like adding forum specific search back is something we can likely get done in the next release.
And, to your point on avatars, it's a very often requested feature for CS and I'd wager a higher percentage of users leverage it than CS search (as opposed to just googling things). But your point is taken that we can tweak some things about our existing search.
Christian Vanderbeck on on 8.21.2008 at 12:07 PM
@Leo - We do have the roadmap up! It's posted here: communityserver.com/.../a-peek-into-fut