Hi.

I'm what you might call the community manager. I'm responsible for this platform in terms of the features and functions it delivers, how it looks, and how it evolves.

Generally speaking, we have two broad goals in mind. The first is to deliver a simple team blog: a place from which we can add our voice to the conversation. The second goal is somewhat more ambitious. In time we'd like this to become a hub of activity around our services.

With regard to the former, you can expect to see posts from the product team members aligned with the following themes:

• Workspace in the news, customer testimonials, our educational program , portal updates 
• vNext – current customer needs, vNext changes, new feature announcements 
• User experience - highlight current features, tips & tricks, support issues, user experience improvements 
• Live team – outages (in the unlikely event), upgrades, changes 
• And of course, getting to know the team.

In a few weeks, I'll take the covers off the forums -- no news there yet, just ordinary forums to support the asking and answering of questions. For a while, most of what you see will be features that come out of the box. Rest assured, however, that things will get more interesting.

How interesting? I'm into the co-creation thing. I'd like to build in features that permit rich interaction between product group and service user to support joint planning activities related to the Workspace product itself. I'd also like the same level of support for user interaction around the key activities Workspace enables.

So, got any ideas? What's the best service related community experience around? Should I start a Facebook group? I'm not the biggest fan of Second Life, but I suppose I could be convinced to get my feet wet. Do you use del.icio.us? There are a billion (okay, perhaps only a few dozen) great services we can deliver if we integrate social bookmarking. We're already talking about integrating Twitter. And it might be cool to do something unexpected with IM. I'd like to say the sky's the limit, but the fact is I'm on a budget. But, for the right idea...

I have few pre-conceived notions here so please get crazy and let me know the result. Better yet, send photos -- please keep it clean and in all ways professionally appropriate. (Actually, if they're good photos, don't break any laws, and are in any way relevant, I'll post em. I swear I will.)

About me? I've been focused on social computing from the beginning. I've been a program manager, a product manager, a product planner, and managed teams in every capacity. (I haven't slung code for several years, and I have to admit, I miss it.) Now, as a community manager I'll be doing a little of everything. If you knew me, you'd know just how well that works for me.

Want to know more? Search bobreb -- most of what you'll find will relate to me. 

Bob Rebholz