Following its pre-release debut at the SharePoint Conference earlier this month, I’m thrilled to formally announce the release and availability of Community Central™ for SharePoint 2010. Community Central is a flexible, scalable, and affordable knowledge-sharing application offering a complete SharePoint-based social solution with best-in-class forums, blogs, community administration tools, and social networking features such as ratings and scoring for top contributors.

Extending the collaboration features inherent within the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform, organizations can now take advantage of Community Central to fundamentally change the way they manage and share information.  Just some of the many use cases that businesses can benefit from augmenting their SharePoint environment with Community Central include:

• Organizations that want to keep users up-to-date and self-sufficient providing the answers they need online—whenever they need them.
• Emergent businesses that want to hook their audience, attract new customers, and use social media tools to provide instant and up-to-date information.
• Hosting providers that want to save time and money supplying an active user base with instant answers to commonly asked questions or concerns.
• Companies that want to strengthen their customer service abilities sharing knowledge internally as well as with external partners and customers.
• E-learning institutions that want to provide students the ability to download training materials and share knowledge in “Birds-of-a-Feather” private discussions.

Features include:

• Site templates for community site, blog site, and forum site:

• Search capabilities where users can either narrow the search to specific site or include all sites:

• Control Panels for administrative control of the application’s features and site settings:

• The ability to raise the relevance of forum topics or posts via Sticky, Verify as Answer, and/or Suggest as Answer features:

• Support for Forms-based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint 2010 for both intranet and extranet
• Support anonymous access for both intranet and extranet
• Ratings for forum and blog posts
• Blog posts with integrated users’ profile
• Integrates CAPTCHA technology as security for comments and to repel attacks from spam bots:

• Provide recognition to frequent site contributors via scorecard
• Community Statistics:
  • Identify the most popular blogs and forum topics based on views, replies, and ratings.
  • View daily and total activity summaries per blog or forum site and for the entire community.
  • Track the most active contributors using scoring with points assigned for blog and forum activities such as new posts, replies, comments, or verified answers.

• RSS Feed
• And much more…

As always, our team is committed to making Community Central the most useful and beneficial platform for knowledge-sharing and social collaboration on SharePoint. We are always open to your feedback, and welcome your questions and comments in the Community Central forum.

We invite you to try out the 1.0 release of Community Central today with a 30-day free trial.