One of the benefits of an energetic and nimble organization is the ability to change directions quickly when new opportunities arise.

The Community Server team has been working feverishly on the 2007.x releases which had the goal of bringing Community Server Groups to market sometime this fall.  While the work is going great and Groups is getting more impressive daily, we know there are some other big changes we can make to take the social networking aspects of Community Server to new heights.

Over the last couple of weeks we started to flush out what we wanted to include in the 2008 release. We were really happy with the direction, but once we factored in the 2007.x releases and the total work which needed to be done, we were not satisfied with the expected shipping dates for the 2008 release.  In addition, even if we were able to move the release date up a couple of months, end users would have to do potentially three large updates to take advantage of all the features.

To sum things up, we had the following on our minds:

1. Our users need improved social networking and communication tools
2. We have a plan to rectify #1
3. Our time to market is hindered by the fact we have multiple releases in the queue
4. Our users do not want to be constantly updating CS
5. We need to get a bunch of new “ideas” to our users ASAP

With the five statements above in mind we knew what we had to do, adjust the shipping schedule.

With these ambitious goals we decided that the next release of Community Server will be the 2008 release (scheduled for first quarter of 2008).  Thus, instead of releasing Community Server 2007.x in October, we will instead plan on releasing the first beta of Community Server 2008 around that time.

Here is what we plan to include in Community Server 2008:

• Social Networking and better overall integration – We’re planning on a lot of work for the 2008 edition centered around social networking and deeper integration between the various components (some of which are detailed below).
• Groups – Groups are similar to Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups, they allow you to create micro-communities within your site.
• Messaging – The private message feature becomes its own application.  It will exist in the users profile and make it super easy for users to communicate not just with individuals, but with the community at large and their friends.
• Photos – Each user profile will also be getting its own place to manage and store files. There will be some nice UI for managing and tagging pictures, but the real goal here is to make it easy to embed images in your profile, blog and forum posts and to easily push selected files in the Community Server media gallery.
• Media Gallery – The existing photo and file gallery applications will be merged into one core application which is capable of not only managing files, but displaying them (ie, Images) in a very rich way. We also plan on improving the video support at this time as well.
• Friends – We will now support friends and fans. With both we will make it easy to see your relationships, and get information like recent forum/blog posts (via search) as well as (and most importantly) Message and images
• Profiles – We’re planning an update to how profiles for people within the community can be updated and published.
• Control Panel – we will have a brand new version of the control panel which has been streamlined to simplify common tasks as well as to better enable users to focus on their current tasks.
• REST API – the REST API will be a full feature web service stack for Community Server. It will allow remote access to all CS data (posts, users), settings, etc. In addition to the API, we will also be shipping a full client API to make it very easy to get up and running.

We hope you are as excited about these changes as we are. We are doing our best to get them to you as quickly as possible.

2007 has already been a huge year for Community Server, but we fully expect it to be drop in the bucket compared to what you will be able to do in 2008!

Note: You can still expect to see a service pack or two released before the 2008 release.