Hot on the heels of an article in Wired about Microsoft's newfound openness, it looks like Microsoft is preparing to move away from CommunityServer to their own community platform. Doug Seven, former DotNetJunkie and former ASP.NET MVP, is working for the MXPS Community Technologies Team (Microsoft eXperience Platform Solutions, say that 3x fast). His team has been building a new solution consisting of Discovery, Membership, and Discussion services, to create a brand new experience around Microsoft communities.
Community Discussion Services is a service platform to enable threaded discussion. We are currently building two frontends for this, Forums and Blogs, which will ultimately replace the current http://forums.microsoft.com and http://blogs.msdn.com / http://blogs.technet.com.
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Through the use of tagging you will eventually be able to create views of virtual forums - forums that only exist in the context you define. This really changes how you can use forums. Instead of being stuck with the forums we define, you can define your own to pull in messages from all appropriate forums. For example, you could build a forum view of "SQL", "C#" and "Beginner". You would see all threads that have been tagged with these three tags, which could include messages from any of the C# forums, any of the SQL forums, beginner forums, or others. You no longer need to figure out where to look; you tell us what you want to see...and you can susbscribe to an RSS feed of the virtual forum.
Lastly, but certainly not leastly (real word...it is now) is the Membership (and reputation) services. This is really one of the foundation blocks for the rest of the platform. The Membership services enable a consistent user experience across all of the Community Platform. The system is authentication agnostic (i.e. not tied to Passport or ASP.NET Forms auth), but can support nearly any authentication system. Regardless of the authentication entry point we can support a single user entity accross the system.
Here's one of the screenshots.
So, it will be interesting to see how all this plays out. From Doug's post, it looks like "Athens" will compete directly with Technorati and Community Server, at least initially. But it still leaves a ton of questions open. Some that immediately come to mind:
- What if I want someone else providing the structure? Will the owner of the blog or forum be able to define their own default view of their content?
- What about popularity services? Tagging is great, and so are views based on those tags... but how do you know what other people are reading?
- Are there going to be APIs tied into these services, or will it be a Microsoft-only thing?
- Will this be a software product, a la Community Server, or a Microsoft-only thing?
But even without answers to those questions, it is still probably one of Microsoft's most innovative projects to date. hopefully we'll be seeing more about how this shapes up in the very near future.