Foreword

We’ve come a long way from the vision of building a Community Platform. While we are all thrilled with the success the product has had, we are not nearly satisfied and have many more plans for the platform. In fact, we at Telligent believe we have created an entirely unique and new type of solution: a "Community Management System", although the acronym CMS is already taken!

Communities are becoming an increasingly important tool for organizations to use to support their products and initiatives. Communities help you understand and connect to people, such as Microsoft’s use of forums.xbox.com as a community for supporting the millions of Xbox gamers. Communities allow you to participate in discussions about your company, people, and products such as Dell’s Direct2Dell.com blog. Communities also enable you to create vital tools for talking to customers without spending money on marketing campaigns.

Community Server is the platform that enables all of these scenarios and this book will help introduce you to Community Server and impart the knowledge you need to build a community solution.

In this book, Anand Narayanaswamy will walk you through all of the various capabilities of Community Server, such as how blogs, forums, photo galleries, and file sharing can be used. He will also impart to you some tips & tricks for configuring your Community Server application. More importantly, this book will serve as a handy guide if you are implementing Community Server for your organization.

As I write this foreword our development team is hard at work on version 3.0 of Community Server. The goal for Community Server 3.0 is to greatly simplify the themes engine and to ensure that anyone can make changes to the user experience using simple What You See Is What You Get editors without any knowledge of ASP.NET, CSS, or HTML. At the same time we will not compromise on the platform and Community Server will continue to be a reference software solution that demonstrates best practices for writing software on Microsoft’s .NET platform.

With that I present to you this book and hope to see you online at www.communityserver.org.

Thank you,

Rob Howard

Chief Executive Officer

Telligent Systems