I just watched a screencast showing off Movable Type's Community Solution. It adds community features to Movable Type such as forums, community blogs, social voting(!), user profiles.
I am not sure how this would play if we were to incorporate this with the blogs@PSU. Would we allow users to great their own communities in their personal web space? Would we use this to power a content hub that would integrate individual's personal blog posts? The screencast made it seem like a user's profile page could contain links to all their posts, comments, and forum activity.
Another feature of the community pack is the ability to add custom fields to blog/forum posts, pages, assets, etc. This could add some additional structure to blog posts being used as part of a class - The instructor could guide the students' blogging by creating some custom fields. Right now I am thinking that it might be too much overhead. Keeping things really simple is key, I think. I have learned that lesson several times over.
If you are wondering what I am going on about, just check out the screencast.
Would the community pack work in our installation. In other words, given our mods to make it work in our infrastructure limit our ability to add "packs" to our service without lots of work. I, personally, would love to offer this set of features. It's only disk space as far as I'm concerned. MT publishes information efficiently, and I don't see this as a balance of (distributed) system resource issue. It's only disk space. We can manage that. Heaven forbid we give our end-users services that they actually use.
I can't really say how easy it would be to integrate this, as I haven't gotten my hands on a copy. I would guess that it would work out of the box, but there would be some level of work to be done to get it to function in a way that would make sense for our users.
Looking at the requirements page, it does sound like the community pack uses the same static publishing model as the core MT. It does not require dynamic publishing. So that works in our favor.