Community in SharePoint v3, part of Office 12

There are lots of small changes that come together to enhance the community support in SharePoint v3.  Here is an overview:

• People become first class citizens, where ever a person appears in SharePoint the information available is improved
• There is a person field type that can be added to lists and is standard in many of the bundled list types,  SharePoint knows how to do sensible things with a field that contains a person.
• The same is true of groups
• Distribution lists can now be created at the same time as a new SharePoint space,  this can be used for all sorts of email scenarios. 
• Information can be posted into SharePoint using email.  For example calendar invites emailed into a calendar list create appointments, or discussion topics in a discussion list, or documents in a document library, or email archives
• Discussions are much more powerful,  they can be flat, threaded, have rich text, be interacted with via email,  and taken off-line in outlook, and can support custom fields.
• Because discussions are lists they can be analysed in Access and Excel, which can be very useful given the custom field support.  In the web UI that can also be filtered and sorted based on custom fields as well.
• New templates are included for Blogs and Wiki’s.  Both provide all of the core functionality you would expect, but they are not best of breed.
• Blogs include posting, comments, categories, subscription and RSS.  They support customisable and per item security on posts and separate security on who can comment.

Skills and experience

• People have a rich profile
• People can record and make visible current and previous projects, memberships, skills etc in their profile which can then be searched
• Searching for experts can include information in the profile and also clues on expertise derived from evidence in SharePoint documents and lists as well as email 
• People can find other people they know, and people that people they know know.  This provides for social networking

My Sites:

• My sites provide a personal portal, with all of your documents, tasks etc but also a place to create your public face. You can control which bits of your profile are made public and to who,  so for example your home phone number might be available only to colleagues.