In my last blog post, I wrote about two new tools for SharePoint that have come out that let you do a wiki and blog engine. Rob Howard, founder of Telligent Systems who builds Community Server, posted a comment to my blog with some very interesting news that was worth sharing:

"Sharepoint integration is high on our list of important features. Our Roadmap:
http://www.communityserver.org/i/roadmap.aspx

Lists it as something we'll start on within the coming months. We've just hired a new developer specifically to focus on our Sharepoint integration efforts."

Woohoo! That's fantastic news! Community Server is a great platform in and of itself and will be a great compliment to SharePoint's feature set. We use blogs internally within our organization with Community Server and could definitely benefit from better integration, administration, and overall (especially) user experience. Besides the blogs feature, I'm also looking forward to replacing SharePoint's discussion and content management web parts outright.

I think Community Server has a lot of potential in this space and I'm glad to see that Rob and the other CS folks are angling to capitalize on it. Even more interesting is the an announcement that Microsoft has added Community Server to their Windows-Based Hosting Web Site Starters, along with the ever increasingly popular DotNetNuke portal system. Very cool!

Technorati Tags: sharepoint, community server