Microsoft.community
With all these milestones, it would be easy to feel happy and proud of all that has happened, however that would be premature. You've heard talk about the future of forums and blogs...well, that future is fast approaching. With an upcoming beta of Microsoft.community, we are embarking on an integrated approach to community that is based upon discovery, rapport, and discussion services. What does all of that mean? Well, without going into too many details, discovery is the foundation for our tagging and social bookmarking services. Rapport services all deal with the presentation of one's self, how your community contributions are managed, etc. As for discussion services, ah well, that's something near and dear to my heart -- blogs and forums.
At this point, I have to talk a little bit more about blogs and forums, given how closely I've been working on them the past few months. With the deep integration of discussion services with tagging and rapport, we are able to present a wider range of experiences for you (either as a content contributor or a content consumer) to be better informed, better connected, and more productive. In non-marketing speak, what do I mean by this? From the forums side of things, an example of this is having your own custom forum based on tags. No more searching through multiple forums wondering where content may live. If there is content tagged with things you're looking for, those threads appear in your custom forum.
Theoretically this custom view works for blogs as well -- where you can find all blog posts tagged a certain way to have your own custom blog view, but that's not nearly as interesting (to me) as tools meant to help blog authors know what to write about. A common theme expressed by prospective blog authors is that they don't know what to say. Well, we're providing some tools built in to our blog solution that help authors identify what is being discussed by those of importance to them, and they can then choose to write about that topic, or something entirely different. For the author, this means they are able to join into conversations with others prepared with the most relevant information about what others are saying. For readers of this blog, people are able to be better informed (by extension of the author being better informed), in addition to being better connected to these other blog authors, and lastly, the readers are more productive because they are able to get information from a wide variety of sources by just reading one -- the blog author who was assisted with "knowing what to write."
These are just some of the many new experiences we're providing with Microsoft.community. Look for more updates from the team about new developments to Microsoft.community in the weeks ahead.
Additional posts from our team on Microsoft.community
Brian Hsi works with the MSDN, TechNet and Expression teams focused on community planning. Prior to this, Brian worked as a product manager for blogs and forums, in addition to working on a wide variety of community initiatives for MSN Games.
