Community Platform Updates Coming Soon
There are several interesting things coming soon from the Community Platform team.
Social Bookmarking
We're releasing a nice Social Bookmarking Preview in late May. Our marketing team is planning some minor hoopla to show the app off at TechEd.
MSDN, TechNet and Expression will all have their own instance of the bookmarking app, so you will experience the app as MSDN Social Bookmarking, TechNet Social Bookmarking, etc. Nevertheless, you are not constrained to bookmarking items on these sites, or even within Microsoft. You will be able to bookmark almost any item on the Internet that has a URL (the exceptions being adult sites and the like).
Social Bookmarking is a useful way for you to save your favorites on the server and access them from any machine or browser. This in itself is helpful for technical professionals who frequently move between machines and browsers. You can apply one or multiple tags to each item you bookmark to help you browse and search your bookmarks later.
The Preview will show off some interesting ideas about how bookmarks and tags can be socially shared. For example, you'll be able to view an aggregated list of bookmarks from all users, along with an aggregated tag cloud. This is an interesting way to explore what other users are interested in, and to discover topics that are popular now. (And yes, we do support private bookmarks that only you can see!)
Most of the core functionality that we're delivering now has been done by other sites like Del.icio.us. What's new is that our experience is fully integrated into the Community Platform and will therefore be available to a wide range of users who have not used other bookmarking sites. In addition, we're moving toward a fully integrated tagging and bookmarking strategy where Forums, CodePlex and Library Annontation (aka Wiki) tags are combined so they can be browsed in a common tag cloud and managed in one place. (Only Forums tags will be integrated in the Social Bookmarking Preview.)
Updated Profile
We're enhancing User Profile to provide a richer experience to view information about yourself and others. Our May release will feature an updated UI that lists the forums contributions and bookmarks for every user. When you view your own profile, you'll have the option of editing your settings.
These changes make each user's profile more attractive and interesting, but they are just a small step in our larger plan to make Profile a rich, central place for users to present themselves to the community and manage their stuff within MSDN, TechNet and Expression.
Forums Migration
While we continue to improve lots of things with Forums 3.x, an all-new Forums solution, the big news is that we're preparing to migrate the old forums to the new application. This migration will start with about 60 forums that we plan to migrate by the end of the month. Examples include the Forefront and Visual Studio forums.
We are trying to be really careful to minimize any disruption for users, moderators and product teams who depend on the forums every day. The migration is meant to be robust, so we are migrating forums posts and threads, user info and user points. One of the thornier problems is that there are 10's of thousands of existing links to the forums, so rather than letting those links break when we move the forums, we're going to update the existing forums to correctly redirect incoming requests for migrated threads to the migrated version of the thread.
We currently expect to migrate the forums in chunks over the summer. The migration process is fairly automated, so it would not be technically challenging to migrate them all at once, but our users and moderators have asked to move more slowly so they have time to prepare for the change.
