Got Community Server 2.0, Beta 2?
Yesterday, Rob Howard informed us that Community Server 2.0, Beta 2 is now available. (Wahoo!) Being a bit of a beta junkie, I grabbed the latest build earlier today and updated johnandfiona.com (my wedding site) to Community Server 2.0, Beta 2. Overall, the upgrade experience from Beta 1 to Beta 2 was virtually painless; simply run a T-SQL script, repost the site files and update web.config. High praise should go to the folks at Telligent Systems for ensuring a smooth transition between builds. Generally-speaking, this isn't the easiest goal to achieve when building software.
Overall, I'm pretty excited by what the folks at Telligent Systems are trying to do in v2.0. Essentially, the goal is to strip out the amount of duplication occurring between blogs, forums, and galleries while building out new features. This is quite a feat, if you ask me. However, the development team appears to be winning the battle. One feature I particularly like is the new Control Panel. This application provides a top-level view of all your applications (i.e. blogs) through an intuitive user interface. It also provides the ability to obtain analytical data about these applications. For example, you can generate reports on who's visiting your site. This is very nice.
If you're running a site today and you're looking for a solution to help you create and maintain blogs, forums, photo galleries and so on, I would strongly encourage you to check out Community Server.
