How would you evolve Community Server?

Last week, at the In.Telligent conference I gave the keynote on our product roadmap.  It’s rare that I have so many customers captive in one room so I used the opportunity to gather some feedback in real time.  I distributed a list of features broken out by theme and told everyone they had $100 virtual dollars to distribute between the features. 

I excluded most of what we have planned for CS 2009 in February to get a little more forward looking.  I promised I would post the results on this blog. Here is the breakout…

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It verified a lot of things we’ve assumed. When we looked closer at the breakout it was clear:

  • Mobile is hot. Everyone wants visitors to take their communities with them.
  • Calendars were seen as a critical tool that enables people to link virtual interactions to the real world.   Group calendars, event management, & calendar synchronization were all in the top 5.
  • Conference goers didn’t consider social tools in the intranet as task management applications.
  • Everyone I talked to on the subject seemed to validate that social tools need to add content management or Vica Versa if you are a CMS vendor.  Our embeddable comments feature received an ovation during the demo portion of the roadmap and that also seems to validate this.
  • There was a surprising lack of passion around social bookmarking tools.

Overall we received votes back from 91 of attendees and I’m looking forward to taking this exercise to a broader audience online in the future.  Thanks to everyone that contributed!