We're continuing to do performance tuning and monitoring on the system. In parallel, we are continuing our software development, both in-house here at VMware as well as at Jive. We've got several features and UI changes in the pipeline.

In the shorter term, we are reintroducing several useful features that we used to have in the old VMTN based on Jive Forums that were not present in the Jive Clearspace platform we're now using. These features are in testing and we hope to have them out to you next week. (I hope early next week.)

• Threaded display mode for discussions. This will add a preference to display discussions as a tree of indented replies. People have strong feelings about this, one way or another. For most forums, I actually prefer a flat display, and as an admin, I think flat displays help keep a thread on topic. However, for the intense discussions and the demographic we have here, and because we are all used to it, I think a threaded display is absolutely necessary. It's actually very useful as an moderator as well if we have to delete a message or branch a thread.

• View all posts from a user. This will show all the messages posted by a user in a tab on their profile. Right now, in your profile you can only see the threads you've started, not the ones you've replied to. This is useful to keep track of your current conversations, and it's also useful to get more context about others in the community and what all they're participating in.

• Set posts per page. This is a real convenience function to be able to set 50 instead of 15 posts/page. Right now, the default is 15 and you have to keep resetting it. This will be a preference, as it was in Forums.

• Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the community you're in, as it did in Forum. Once you're doing a search, you can specify other communities. Tip: you can select multiple communities -- for Windows, use shift-click or control-click.

• Legibility tweaks. We will be tweaking the UI for fonts and colors to make it more readable.

Outstanding high-priority issues that will be addressed, but not by early next week:

• Rich Text Editor. It doesn't load all the time, and is frustrating when it loads. This is the highest priority item for which I don't have a scheduled fix date. Tip: try out the Plain Text editor -- it's faster, and it has automatic spell-check.

• Search. Results are per-message, not per-thread; there is no user filter (although you will be able to see all posts by a user now); some syntax isn't working; search results can be poor in general. Tip: use Boolean syntax (foo AND bar, foo || bar), not Google-style syntax. Also, you can use Google and add the term "(site:communities.vmware.com OR site:www.vmware.com/community)" -- works pretty well. Google still has a mix of old and new pages in its index.

• Front page. We want to simplify the front page and add indications there when there are unread messages within a community.

• Right sidebar. The right sidebar was designed as a way of adding contextual resources to each community -- links to docs, latest builds, kb articles, white papers, security alerts, blog postings from the team. For performance reasons, every community shows the same sidebar, and it takes up too much room on the page. We will address this.

• Favorites/Watches. Have some graphical way in the communities of indicating which threads you're interested in, instead of having to go to your profile.

A fuller list of outstanding issues is VMware Communities Known Issues. I think soon we'll be faster and more powerful than where we were, so we can get back to the business of virtualization. (Oh, and there are some very interesting new community topics and blogs in the pipeline, but that's for another day.)