Considering the commercial editions
Community Server's commercial editions offer a number of attractive additional features, including gateways for news, email, and FTP; an enterprise search based on Lucene.NET (discussed in Chapter 4); and a sign-on module enabling single sign-ons between Community Server and other systems such as Active Directory, InfoCard, Microsoft Passport, and others.
Getting Support
Telligent, the company behind Community Server, offers a wide variety of support options for Community Server, ranging from free support at the tool's web site to a variety of paid support options (see http://communityserver.org/i/support.aspx for details).
You can learn more about features of Community Server, watch videos, and ask questions at the Community Server web site. A developer Wiki and numerous forums and FAQs are also available.
Community Server in a Nutshell
This article has covered only a few of the highlights of Community Server as a collaboration platform. Features such as the photo gallery, file gallery, RSS reader, reports, and other administrative capabilities haven't even been touched upon.
The Community Server platform is a stable system used by a number of well-known organizations to support their community efforts, including Autodesk, LEGO, Lenovo, Intel, Microsoft, and many others. However, it is still evolving. The next major version promises to include tools for simplifying content management and enabling easier "look-and-feel" modifications through browser-only access.
Community Server continues to be an innovative platform in the .NET field, and it's one of the largest professional shared-source applications available for .NET developers. One of the exciting new developments that Community Server users will see shortly is tools to help monetize their communities through advertising. A lot of work is being done to build in great support for text-based ad systems such as Google, which community owners can optionally enable.
-- Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent Systems, Inc., creators of Community Server
by James Avery and Jim Holmes
ISBN-10: 0-596-52754-3
Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher.
Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media, Inc.