Okay, I'm not sure if you caught this announcement yet or not .. but Community Server is getting integrated with MOSS.

Why is this a big deal? Well, unless you've been under a rock for the past few years, Community Server powers some of the most prominent sites with community features, such as forums, blogging, and photo galleries.

And also, unless you've been under a rock for the past few years, SharePoint has taken the enterprise by a storm.

So marry the two together!! OMG!! Why didn't we think of this before? mm .. okay apparently someone did think of it before.

Now SharePoint, (even WSS), did come with decent blogging capabilities. MOSS also had a Wiki. But well, they were good, but they weren't community server! To come over many of those shortcomings, CKS:EBE (codeplex.com/cks) was created. CKS:EBE is a very nice peice of work and you can see it running at cks.wssblogs.com. But community server is so much more than just blogs!

Quoted from MSFT's blogpost -

By positioning Community Server next to your existing SharePoint application, you unlock several key integration points:

• Fully Integrated Experience Community Server is fully integrated into SharePoint through single sign-on and custom SharePoint WebParts along with deep support for SharePoint management of these new capabilities.
• Enterprise Grade Blogging Utilizing Community Server’s Enterprise grade blogging product users of SharePoint can interact with Community Server blog content, allowing the user to view blog content in SharePoint and read, comment on, and post content. Community Server’s built in support for rich media, moderation tools, permissions, and more bring SharePoint blogging to a whole new level.
• Feature Rich Forums SharePoint users will benefit from the incredibly rich Community Server Web 2.0 message boards with full support for read, reply, and posting all within SharePoint. To unlock the full features of the forums, users can still go directly into their Community Server forums.
• Social Streams Community Server’s new Social Streams feature is additionally available in SharePoint. Similar to Facebook style user activity you will be able to browse a chronological list of updates from what your friends are doing both within SharePoint and Community Server.
• Rich, detailed Reporting Utilizing the new Harvest® Reporting Server suite you can now extract a tremendous amount of rich detail about how your users are using Community Server’s social networking and collaboration functionality.

Together Microsoft’s SharePoint Server and Telligent’s Community Server provide an enterprise ready, scalable, secure, proven platform that delivers an integrated solution for your customers.

.. Oooh .. I'm tickled pink ! :-).

Now how about a hosted version of MOSS with Community Server? LOL :-).