Today started as a typical day. Meetings, meetings and more meetings and a few calls thrown in for good measure. One of the highlights of the day was that I was able to demo the pre-beta bits of the Groups functionality of the upcoming Community Server 2008 release (March, 2008) to one of our key clients. CS 2008 will be a landmark in social networking web application history as it will be the most robust and feature rich .NET integrated platforms released to date.

Of the new CS 2008 features: expanded profiles (think facebook), media gallery, enhanced private messaging, simplified control panel, REST API stack and the introduction of dynamic side bar widgets. One of the great features is the new groups functionality. Groups features a two tier categorization system (E.g. NFL --> Cowboys). Each group will have access to a robust feature set including options to position a group blog, discussion forum and file gallery (media gallery by retail release) as well as having the option to quickly publish pages relevant to the group. All of the information can be consumed via RSS or via e-mail subscription and accessing a control panel is not required as management tools are based on the permissions of the user and presented directly in the UI.

The most impressive aspect of the groups functionality is the introduction of side bar widgets. You have the option to configure the right nav and control the type of information that is presented to the group. Want to highlight the tags or position a tag cloud or reference common links? It is easy with the simple UI. The most intriguing aspect is the ability to create custom widgets that can then be imported. This will provide a lot of flexibility in the type of information that can be presented and the best part is that all of the groups application data will be tied to the new REST API stack.

This will be a very popular application moving forward and the Telligent Product team does an outstanding job of continuing to innovate and redefine the platform. I cannot wait for the release of Community Server 2008!!!