Community Server 2008 Launched!
Early this morning Telligent launched Community Server 2008 and a new home on http://communityserver.com/. Some of the details are located here, but my pet favorite things about CS 2008 include…
- Enterprise reporting and analytics to help dissect, analyze, and trend user and community behavior.
- For developers, Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services (REST) API for easily integrating and extending the platform.
- Widgets for easily sharing data between applications. (Includes widget support for Google and more).
- Facebook-like rich user profiles, a “friending” system, & social streams to keep tabs on your community.
- Groups that enable larger community sites to create smaller public or private “niche” communities. Like having “mini-community servers” hosted in your larger community.
I’ve had very limited involvement, but have had the opportunity to be a “fly on the walll” as the product team closed out this release. I was very impressed with the attention to detail and effort that went into creating this product and am looking forward to being able to help more directly on future releases.
Oh yeah, my new job… the first product focused Program Manager at Telligent. I guess that makes me “Director of Program Management”. I officially started earlier this month and have been working to define the role while planning the next few big releases from Telligent. They have some awesome devs to have gone this long without our discipline. 
I spent some time browsing the new CS site. The one thing that struck me right away was the social stream you mention. The first thing I did was check in my profile to see how I can opt out of it. To my shock, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do so. After the Facebook fiasco (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130) I’m amazed that Telligent would release a product that would lead it’s customers in to a similar embarrassing trap. I sure hope there isn’t fallout from such an oversight.
Kendra
Kendra I definitely agree there should be a user based opt-out. If nothing else in the mean time the admin at least has the ability to turn off the feature, which is what I will do until users have the ability to choose.