As recently announced, yesterday we released the final bits for Community Server 2008. With this release, we've nearly doubled the capabilities of CS adding support for Amazon S3, Friends, Groups, Media, Messaging, Widgets, WebServices and more!

One of the key differences between CS 2008 and previous versions is our focus. Previous to CS 2008, content was king. With our introduction of rich profiles (announcements, comments, activities, files, ...) we've focused on keeping it social. In fact, once you've logged into a CS site, instead of seeing reasons to join a community (of which you're already a member), you'll instead be presented with a dashboard displaying recent forum/blog/media posts, single click access to your friends, groups, and private conversations, and a list of what your friends have been up to. With even more support for RSS, you can get to all this information offline as well.

Finally, the introduction of a new integration layer, built as a set of RESTful web services and a C# wrapper, will make system integration and 3rd party tools even easier than before.

If you haven't seen it in action, you owe it to yourself to download a copy or just visit our updated online community.

We recently updated communityserver.org to the latest bits. While we're not ready to call it Beta 2, we are certainly getting closer. The Beta 2 milestone is our target for being feature complete, including changes to the user interface. As such, we're busy putting final touches on features, finding/fixing bugs, and going thru much of UI with a fine-toothed comb. We're also writing samples and documentation for our new web services layer that will ship with Community Server 2008.

Now that user profiles support micro-blogging thru profile "announcements", and those announcements include support for rich content (html, images, video, ...), I'm planning on "dog-fooding" the feature and talking about many of the new features in CS 2008 from my profile. So if you're looking to hear more about what's new, you may want to visit my profile page (or just subscribe to my announcements feed). My plan is to post to it a couple times a week.

Over the past couple months, things have been changing...

1. It started with Christmas and a Wii for the boys. While I still play the 360, I'm hooked on Wii Sports...especially bowling.
2. Soon after the holidays, I found myself on the other side of the PC vs. Mac war as the proud owner of a MacBookPro. While I'm not using it 100% for day-to-day work, I'm enjoying the simplicity and plan to move to the Mac exclusively over the next couple months.
3. Earlier this week, with our recent product launch, I switched my blog from CommunityServer to Graffiti. I still think CommunityServer is a great product (and I'm working hard on the 2008 release), but for a single blog Graffiti is a better choice.
4. With the move to Graffiti, I decided to change urls as well. So now I'm bloggin here at http://joselema.com instead of http://tankete.com. When I get some free time I'll migrate old content and setup the proper redirection.

If you had told me a year ago that I'd be playing a Wii, using a Mac (and an iPhone), blogging at a different url and with something *other* than CS, I wouldn't have believed it. But in just two short months, my world has turned inside out. You'd think so much change would feel awkward, but to quote my good buddy Cosmo Kramer, "I'm lovin' every minute of it".

With the release of Graffiti 1.0, we've added an online marketplace where you'll find themes, widgets, and plugins for your Graffiti installation. In addition, we've integrated the marketplace into the product itself!

Check out this recent screencast I made of the Graffiti Marketplace: http://www.screencast.com/t/gXcBLdV9goB

Now that we're ready to push Graffiti v1.0 out the door, I've finally put up a new site here at http://joselema.com/. While I still haven't migrating my existing blog over from http://tankete.com, I expect that will happen shortly.

That said, even with Graffiti getting lots of Telligent love, a majority of *my* time is still spent helping a great team make Community Server better each day. But this post isn't about CS :)

Graffiti is in the house!!!