Community Platform goes live!

The first version of the STO Community Platform went live on Valentine's Day, Thursday, February 14.

My team has built this platform to host all community applications for MSDN, TechNet and the new Expression site. This release includes an all-new Forums app, a new Profile app, and a rewritten Search app.

The most prominent use of the new Forums app is the Expression Forums site. MSDN and TechNet forums are mostly still running on our older "Forums 2.4" codebase. The Community Platform Forums for TechNet and MSDN are live but primarily with feedback and sandbox forums only for now.

Migrating existing 2.4 content and users to the Community Platform is a top priority for our team over the next 100 days. Our goal is to have a substantial chunk of MSDN forums migrated by the end of May in support of a “re-launch” of MSDN & TechNet at TechEd in early June.

New Applications

This Community Platform release features many new applications:

·         Forums 3.0: 100% new code that will replace the existing Forums 2.x solution in coming months. Highlights include a phenomenal new UI, automatic updates and our first social tagging deployment. Users and stakeholders who have seen pre-release versions of forums are raving about its rich capabilities and user interface.

·         Search 3.0: A rewrite of the existing MSDN/TN search application with improved auto-complete functionality, improved international search (including 20 languages!), and dramatically improved refinements.

·         Profile 1.0: A new centralized place for users to manage their personal settings, such as display name, avatar and signature.

·         Discovery Services 1.0: A high performance feed and tag “engine” that provides a RESTful interface to query editorially managed and tag-driven dynamic feeds. Forums tagging, search refinements, RSS feeds, forum categories and related sites are some of the features enabled by Discovery Services.

·         Feed Management Tool 1.0: A browser-based internal tool that lets site managers and other authorized stakeholders create, edit, tag and schedule both feed items and feeds that are available in both RSS 2.0 and ATOM formats.

·         STO Apps 1.0: A centralized portal and framework for all Community Platform management tools. The feed management tool, forums admin, global profanity filter management, tag management and all other Platform tools are available on this site and make use of a shared framework that provides consistent UI and role-based security.

Platform Features

In addition to the stand-alone applications listed above, there are many foundational capabilities and features in the Community Platform. For example:

·         Shared UX: The framework is highlighted by the all-new Coronado/Boston masthead design that will be rolled out in all MSDN, TechNet and Expression apps, including the Community Platform apps, the Library, Centers, Code Gallery and future Platform apps.

·         Social Tagging and Feeds: Every application can leverage the rich social tagging and feed support enabled by Discovery Services.

·         Feed Service End Point: A universal endpoint to query feeds from any Community Platform application.

·         Friendly URLs: Simple URLs that are easier to type and remember.

·         Globalization Framework: Rich standardized globalization support that can be extended and customized as needed by individual apps.

·         Multi-Brand Support: Every application is available in each brand. MSDN, TechNet, Expression and Microsoft brands are supported currently.

·         Shared App Framework: All apps are built on a common framework that provides master pages and controls, config, instrumentation, error logging and much more.

What’s Next