LinkedIn to upgrade groups with discussions

I have received the following mail from LinkedIn being the owner of two groups and manager of one group as follows:

a) Virtually Networked
b) Social Media in India
c) Symbiosis Alumni

Dear Shefali,

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We're confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

Sincerely,
The LinkedIn Groups Team

This Friday you can expect new discussion capability to be enabled for Group managers and members. This is a very welcome change as until now there were very limited options available with group owners, it was nothing more than a list of people interested in a common subject. If you need to send any message to your group members, you were supposed to export their email addresses and then sending them mail using any Yahoo! Mail / Gmail. Not the best option I would say. Discussing stuff online will save many of us from unnecessary spam.

Moreover they are also planning to release an enhanced capability for searching members in the Group. This is a very logical upgrade after the release of searchable Groups Directory.

Looking forward to that !!