Book Image

Community Server Quickly

By : Anand Narayanaswamy
Book Image

Community Server Quickly

By: Anand Narayanaswamy

Overview of this book

Community Server is Telligent System's award-winning solution for quickly and easily enabling online communities. It includes a suite of integrated applications, such as blogs, discussion forums, photo sharing, file sharing, email lists, newsgroups, and more, which together can help you create your community presence. Community Server is the trusted solution for many organizations ranging from Microsoft and Dell to Conde Nast and Match.com, and powers massive communities like the Microsoft ASP.NET forums (www.asp.net/forums) and the XBOX forums (forums.xbox.com). You can learn more about Community Server, and see it in action, at http://www.communityserver.org. Written in a clear and concise manner, this book will guide you through the installation, administration, customization, and deployment of a Community Server solution. With the help of this book you will be able to start using your Community Server site within minutes of its installation. The book kicks off with a brief overview of Community Server, its various editions and licensing options, and installation procedures and then delves deep into the creation and management of blogs, forums, photo galleries, file galleries, and more. The book also explores the different ways you can customize your Community Server site along with coverage of various add-ons and modules. You will also learn how to manage your Community Server license and other related settings. Towards the end, the book provides an overview of the various steps required to deploy Community Server to a hosting server.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Community Server Quickly
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

What's New in Community Server 3.0 (or Calypso)?


Telligent has already announced plans for the release of Community Server 3.0. The version has been code named as Calypso. It will be mainly targeted towards simplifying common tasks with intuitive wizards, improvement of user interfaces, and adding more help-oriented content. Moreover, Community Server 3.0 will only run on ASP.NET 2.0, unlike Community Server 2.0 which ran on both ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0.

The key features that are proposed to be included with Community Server 3.0 are listed overleaf.

Chameleon

This is a theme engine that will deliver a simpler way to create themes. It will also include features that will enable users to manage the look/feel of a theme via the Control Panel. The goals are to reduce the number of files involved in skinning a blog and to provide a streamlined non-technical set of tools for easily creating user interfaces.

Morpheus

This is a membership update tool, which will be integrated with the ASP.NET 2.0 membership store. This will allow easier integration with existing user bases and external storage of membership data.

Zion

This is a new centralized file storage system, which will provide more consistent and extensible support for files and attachments in Community Server. In addition, the update to blogs will allow for better image/file support on a per-post basis.

Tallyman

It is the next version of the mail gateway, which will enable anyone, anywhere, including shared hosting and smaller sites, to leverage integrated email and mail list functionality within Community Server.

Telligent is planning to add one more module to Community Server 3.0, which is code-named Mystique. In addition to the above set of new features, Community Server 3.0 also includes an integrated CMS, which will provide knowledge management, content management, and case management functionalities. At the time of writing this book, Calypso is slated for release during the first quarter of 2007.