The endless debate: should you use web based forums or newsgroups? Web based forums, such as those at http://forums.asp.net are great because they provide a rich interactive experience and foster true communities. News groups, on the other hand, are fast simple and support offline as well as online reading.
Unfortunately the technology usually divides the communities – just look at http://forums.asp.net vs. the Microsoft ASP.NET news groups at news://news.microsoft.com. Both ‘communities’ have expert and knowledgeable contributors, but have isolated themselves from one another due to preference in technology.
One of our long standing goals at Telligent is to remove the technology barriers for collaborative communities through Community Server. I’m happy to announce that we’ve been piloting NNTP support for the http://forums.asp.net site and we’re now ready to announce it publicly:
Using the same login credentials for http://forums.asp.net you can now use any RFC compliant news reader, such as Outlook Express, to connect to, browse, read, reply, and post either online or offline.
If you want to learn more about the Community Server NNTP Server — a commercial add-on for Community Server — visit www.communityserver.org (currently available as a release candidate).
