I've been encouraging the entire OLW team to blog with a focus on open dialog: what are they up to with the production product, with the planning, with the communications, and with the support. A number of team members have stepped up, and several others have promised to contribute. I'm looking forward to their posts.

For my own part I'm going to share what I'm up to. It doesn't deal directly with the bits and bytes of the Workspace service, but rather the social computing investments we're making in support of the users of the service. And frankly, I'm hoping to get some help -- planning is always a tricky proposition. This may appeal to people interested in social computing specifically, but because it relates to the services available to this community, Workspace users generally may wish to keep track of the action, or even better, share an opinion or two.

In that regard I've a few things to report.

The first is that the next version of the community platform is done. It includes a somewhat revamped UI and exposes support forums. We've contracted with a forum moderation group to help us bootstrap that process. They'll be helping me populate the forums with the most commonly asked questions and answers our crystal ball says are coming. I've invited the US based Microsoft Office MVPs into the Workspace beta program. They're typically community and support experts extraordinaire and their participation would be very welcome. So far several of them have expressed an interest. The next version will appear on or about December 5th. We will be down for a few hours in the morning to give me a chance to give things a final glance before we go live.

The second item is that we've already kicked off planning for the next series of enhancements. Under consideration are things like user generated content (read wiki), and a more "contemporary" solution for Q&A style support. (I am not a fan of forums as we see them today. If you ask me, if a customer has to stop working to look for an answer we've already failed. I think we can do better.) And of course there are a handful, or two, of odds and ends including some customizations of the existing forums, ongoing revisions to the site theme, and a variety of UI components designed to expose the growing body of community experience we'll be capturing. And then there's the whole subject of community recognition.

However, to put all of this in context, I've decided to share the planning process itself -- how we think about planning social computing initiatives. It's my hope that clarifies how we make investment decisions and gives anyone interested in doing so an opportunity to point out any flawed assumptions that have crept into our thinking, and suggest improvements. I see that happening in several installments, each one building upon the last:

• Defining terms: community/social software/social computing
• Detailing association/relationship types and the development of strategy
• The foundations of online social interaction and the development of tactics
• The role of guiding principles in an ongoing creative development process
• The roadmap

I suspect we'll get to each of these over the next three to four weeks.

What am I missing?

(And yes, I do have a great job.)