Microsoft Community Applications and Services: The Next Wave

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We hear a lot of feedback about how the forums and blogs should work.  And I mean A LOT.  Whether it's internal or external, people always have opinions about how to make them better. I prefer to think that the feedback is proof of how valuable these services are and that we have a responsibility to not only address the feedback, but look for ways to innovate as well.  So, for the past several months, we've been working on evolving our work to reflect the changing nature of community activity.  Our goal is to help people be better informed, better connected, and more productive.

With that in mind, we've release a beta (or we can use Visual Studio terminology and call it a "CTP") of our new services and you'll notice a new one in the mix. 

Tagspace is our way of recognizing the value of user-contributed metadata and how important that can be in connecting people not only to valuable content, but to other people.  The overall information, FAQs, videos, and other good things are here. As you can imagine, the features are not all there yet and I am sure you will run into bugs.  There's a lot we are still working on and you should feel free to provide feedback (our engineering goal is to get into "release early, release often").  This beta release is the first of many steps to get us closer towards the overall vision, but we'd like your help in identifying what's next. Over the course of the next several weeks, our team wants to use the new forums to have such a conversation with you on the questions above. We know we're not perfect, but you ability to partner with users to evolve this platform will result in a solution that everyone can rally around.

We're looking forward to the feedback.