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.