I’m thrilled to formally announce the release and availability of Community Central for SharePoint 2013. Community Central is a flexible, scalable, and affordable knowledge-sharing application, offering a complete SharePoint-based social solution with 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 2013 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 provide 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 supply an active user base with instant answers to commonly asked questions or concerns.
• Companies that want to strengthen their customer service abilities share 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.

New Features:

• Supports SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013.
• Easy-to-use templates for community, blog, and forum sites.
• Search capabilities allow users to narrow the search to a specific site or search the entire site collection.
• Intuitive Control Panels for administrative control of features and site settings.
• Supports Forms-based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint 2013 for both intranet and extranet.
• Supports anonymous access in SharePoint 2013 for both intranet and extranet.
• Supports Forum and Blog Ratings.
• Integrates CAPTCHA technology as added security for comments and to repel attacks from spambots.
• Maintains detailed Community Statistics:
  • Identifies the most popular blogs and forum topics based on views, replies, and ratings.
  • Keeps track of daily and total activity summaries per blog or forum site and for the entire community.
  • Recognizes the most active contributors, using scoring with points awarded for blog and forum activities such as new posts, replies, or comments, and verified answers.
• Includes new site templates for Arabic, German, and Russian.
• Option to Automatically subscribe authors to email alerts on their forum topics.
• Inserting and playing videos in the forum topics and forum posts using the following methods:
  • Embedding a video from shared video sites such as YouTube or Bamboo Video Library into a post using IFrame embed code.
  • Uploading a video (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)
  • Linking to a video (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)
  • Selecting a video from Bamboo Video Library (using Bamboo Video Library, which is sold separately)

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!