Looking ahead to a beta communities refresh

A little over a month ago, we pulled the curtain away and invited you to take a look at the work beng done on the next version of Microsoft blogs and forums.  Additionally, we showed off a revamped version of tagspace, our social bookmarking and tagging solution.  We received a good deal of feedback over the last month, and we are beginning to make an measurable impact.

As we approach June, we are nearing an update to our beta community offerings.  Not only that, but we will be unveiling a new piece to this community solution -- claimspace.

I'll let Korby and others talk more about the upcoming new pieces of tagspace and claimspace.  As for me, I want to give a little preview of what to expect.

For both blogs and forums, there will be a new user interface that should make it easier to navigate, discover new features, etc.  Additionally, we are adding xClaims into both blogs and forums.  Getting to the specific solutions...

One of the new features to look for in the updated blogs is the ability to preview any CSS changes you wish to apply to the blog, before you actually save it.  If you're anything like me and know little of CSS, this is a great thing to have.

From the forums side of things, one of the features in the June refresh is creation of "sticky threads."  For those not familiar with the term, this refers to having one (or several) threads appear a the top of the thread list in the forums view such that it is easy to find later.  As we get more and more messages posted in the beta forums, I expect this to be helpful for people visiting the site.

There are plenty of other features in the June refresh, but to learn what those are...you'll just have to wait for my announcement post ;-)

(xposted in beta)