Introducing Hawaii
Posted by
rhoward
on
March 24 2008
Hawaii is the new theme that we created for Community Server 2008. Hawaii is a very social-centric theme that brings together many of the new features of CS 2008, such as groups, social streams, and more!
Below is a screen shot of Community Server running the Hawaii theme:
While the work isn't 100% complete yet, we wanted to give people a preview of what is coming.
First off you may notice is that the "Home" tab is selected and the page that is shown is a user-centric dashboard. A big goal for us in Community Server 2008 was to make the user more central to the entire experience of Community Server. The "Home" tab now shows information that has recently been created, content that has been contributed to, messages from friends, friend activity, as well as groups.
The feature previously known as "Private Messaging" has been completely re-written for 2008. The feature was previously couple to the forums functionality and only allowed messages between 2 individuals. The new message functionality allows for multiple participants in a "Private Conversation". While an individual message can be started with anyone multiple participants from your friend list can be added. We've added some really nice auto-complete functionality so that your friend list can be browsed as you type:
Friend Activity (Social Stream) is another capability introduced in 2008. With your friend activity list you can more quickly follow what your friends are doing within the community. The friend activity list is extensible so you can plug in custom data/information into the list as well:
The next beta of Community Server 2008 will include the new Hawaii theme -- we're looking forward to your feedback!