Feature

Description

Web Discussions

The web discussion capability of CommunityServer provides all the expected tools to enable rich collaborative discussions through a simple to use web interface.

News Groups

Using the Enterprise News Server, CommunityServer’s forums can be used as an NNTP Server enabling any news reader tools such as Microsoft Outlook to provide threaded on-and-offline discussions.

Public and Private Forums

CommunityServer excels at supporting both public forums, content accessible to anyone, and private forums, which only are accessible to authenticated visitors.

Flat and Threaded Discussions

Flat discussions simply display content in the order as it was posted where as threaded discussions show the relationship between authors as they respond to various posts.

My Discussions

Enables a quick list of posts that the author has recently participated in or that has been recently responded to.

Active Topics

Topics that are considered active discussions; activity is a configurable setting.

Unanswered Topics

Topics that have not yet been answered.

Profile Options

Tools to enable members to control various options within the forums, such as search order, email settings, and more.

Moderated Discussions

All forum discussions support full moderation workflow. Forums can be individually configured for moderation or no moderation and, individual users can be configured for moderation or no moderation (a member with no moderation requirement in a moderated forum does not have his/her posts approved before they are published live).

Moderation Tools

Moderators are given a number of tools from approval: deleting, editing, splitting topics into multiple discussions, joining multiple discussions into a single topic, and more.

Delegated Moderation

Moderation rights can be granted on a forum-by-forum basis so rights for moderation can be delegated to sets of community members.

Auditing

All moderation actions are stored with a moderation audit trail that allows community managers to review moderation actions.

Ratings

Ratings can be configured at the post (individual message) or thread (all messages) level allowing members to identify and rank content that is valuable to them.

Paging

Paging enables the content in a discussion thread to be divided up into smaller sets of information, providing faster render times in the browser. By default the set size is 25, and clicking next or previous will show the next set.

Quoting

Tools in the forums enable readers to interact with other members by clicking a quote option to quote content in their message. Quoted content is displayed differently and also is linked back to the post being quoted.

Favorites

Favorites is a light-weight social networking tool that enables members to mark one another as favorites. It additionally allows members to identify favorite posts or favorite forums for quick access.

Member Points

The Member Points system is an extensible points engine that allows applications to score member contributions. Members receive points for activities such as rating content, posting content, replying to content, identifying forum posts as answers, and so on. The Member Points system can additionally be easily extended with custom rules.

Report Abuse

The Report Abuse tool is a simple way that members can notify community managers about posts that are objectionable.

Posting via Email (Distribution Lists)

Email distributions lists are a popular community tool as they allow for the use of email as the primary communication channel between participants, for example Microsoft Exchange Distribution Lists. With a distribution list there is a single email address with multiple recipients. Enterprise Email Integration provides the community with distribution list functionality, but with the added benefit of automatic archiving and web access through Community Server’s forums.

Posting via News Reader ( News Groups)

News group communities rely upon an aging, but popular with technical communities, Internet technology known as NNTP. The Enterprise News Server is 100% integrated with the web discussion capabilities.

Answered and Unanswered Status

Answered and unanswered status allows community members to track and quickly identify which posts are the answers to questions other community members ask.

Polls and Voting

Built-in polling and voting support allows community managers to easily create embedded polls in the forums.

Archiving

CommunityServer’s database design is such that data archiving does not need to occur for performance reasons. However, if archiving content is desired, we recommend using the built-in archiving tools included with SQL Server for archiving databases.

Permissions

Supports a range of permissions that are assigned to groups. Specific permissions include:

• View – Controls the ability to see the forum. This permission is used to control public/private access.
• Read – Controls the ability to read posts within a forum.
• Post – Ability to post new messages in the forum.
• Reply – Ability to reply to existing messages.
• Vote – Ability to vote in polls.
• Ink – Ability to use Tablet PC ink to author forum content.
• Video – Ability to embed videos in forum posts.
• Attachments – Ability to include attachments in forum posts.
• Edit – Ability to edit posts.
• Delete – Ability to delete posts
• Create Poll – Ability to create polls that enable members to participate in question & answer sessions.
• Mark as Answer – Enable members to mark posts as “answers”.
• Sticky – Enable posts to be configured to stay on top of all other posts for a duration of time. Great for announcements of upcoming events.
• Announce – Enable a post to be marked as an announcement. Great for posting information about the forum that all members should read.
• Edit Members – Ability to edit other site members.
• Moderate – Ability to approve, deny posts in the moderation tools as well as use all the per-post moderation capabilities.