Today Scott published the roadmap for Community Server 2008. The current plan is to have a really strong beta in the fall and officially release Community Server 2008 in Q1 2008.
We’re going to spend a lot more time on the social networking side of the application — a big goal of which is to help big communities feel smaller and more personal. This will include groups, friends and more to make it easier for people to connect. We want to enable scenarios on sites like www.asp.net to allow people to more easily explore, discover, and follow content that applies to them. Today, as with most sites, the responsibility is 100% on the person visiting the site to sort through all the data to figure out where they belong.
This release will also include a REST API for Community Server. We chose to build a REST API vs. a SOAP/ASMX style API for a variety of reasons. We have some challenges to work through still but we should have a pretty complete story this fall. We’re hoping these APIs will enable developers to more easily bring data from their community into other applications such as their SharePoint portal.
We’re also putting a lot of effort into re-thinking the tools for how you manage a community. People constantly tell us about how they view and manage their blogs and we’re making some great headway on getting the Control Panel re-worked (below is the latest screenshot):
Lastly, while we’re doing a lot of interesting things for the next version we fully plan on releasing several service packs for Community Server 2007 too.
I’ll try and post some more details each week on some of the progress we’re making (hopefully with some really cool screenshots too!)
