Windows Developer Power Tools

13.2 Building Online Communities with Community Server

Communities of people are involved in any project. Users, analysts, developers, stakeholders, and managers all have requests, ideas, and messages about a project to communicate with others. A great deal of information travels around between the people involved even in small projects, and the amount of information explodes as the projects grow. Managing this information and making sure all project community members have access to it can be a time-consuming, difficult task. Fortunately, tools and systems exist to ease this effort.

Community Server is a web-based platform that enables companies and organizations to build dynamic online and offline communities quickly and easily. Community Server features include email lists, discussion forums, blogs, newsgroups, galleries, file-sharing and content-management capabilities, and much more. These features will enable you to quickly put together a company intranet or web site for a project, and the platform can easily scale to support very large public-facing community sites (such as http://forums.xbox.com).

Communities are essential in any organization, as people naturally gravitate toward other people whose interests are the same. Building large communities in the past was challenging, as the technology didn’t necessarily exist or had to be stitched together. In many ways, this is the problem Community Server has solved: it provides a straightforward way for people to quickly create ...