March 2008 - Posts

• Community Server and SharePoint Integration

  We just officially announced that Community Server 2008 will also have an awesome integration story for Microsoft SharePoint. You can read more details in the post, but we're obviously very excited to announce this -- it's been in the works for quite a few months now and we'll have a beta ready a few days after we launch Community Server 2008. Posted Mar 27 2008, 08:51 PM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Giving the community credit

  Simone updated an add-on developed for Community Server 2007 that tracks global credits at www.community-credits.com. Posted Mar 26 2008, 10:38 PM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Community Server 2008, Beta 2 now available!

  You can download the beta here: Web Installer Windows Installer Upgrade from Beta 1 to Beta 2 More details on what is included in Beta 2. We'd love to hear your feedback! Posted Mar 26 2008, 11:34 AM by Rob Howard's Blog

• State of the ASP.NET community

  Dan wrote a great piece on the state of the ASP.NET community and there is quite an interesting discussion happening now. Posted Mar 25 2008, 09:08 AM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Live Writer Feature Request

  I love Live Writer it has made publishing content, not just blogging, so much easier. But Live Writer is definitely designed for blogging first and foremost and even for blogging Live Writer is really good for new content, and not so good at getting to old content. What I'd love to have is the ability to open and edit any content via a moniker as well as better tools for browsing previously published content. For example, we are starting to use Live Writer for publishing content to Graffiti's documentation and other site content. In other words, we're using Live Writer as a tool to publish into a Content Management System. It works really, really well for this. URL Monikers Today when signed in as the owner of a blog you'll typically get an edit link that takes you directly to the edit screen for the blog. It would be great if Live Writer could register its own URL moniker [1], maybe "livewriter", so that in addition to the standard edit links you might find a link "Edit in Live Writer" in content where the href pointed to: For systems that had Live Writer installed clicking this link would cause Live Writer to be loaded locally and for Live Writer to attempt to open that specific post from the server. Is there a way, even now, to open a specific post with Live Writer directly via a URL? Maybe another short-term solution is to allow you to open a URL directly vs. having to go through the browse screen (see below). Better Content Sorting I'd also love to see better tools within Live Writer for sorting previously published content. Tools that allowed you to browse by publish date or title. The current open dialog is pretty limited (most likely purposefully): [1] URL Monikers may, unfortunately, be something that is only supported in IE and not in FireFox Posted Mar 24 2008, 10:55 AM by Rob Howard's Blog Filed under: Live Writer

• OpenID and new Community Server logo

  This week we announced support for OpenID in Community Server 2008 and we also unveiled our new Community Server 2008 logo. Let me know what you think! Posted Mar 15 2008, 12:54 PM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Google for business email

  We're thinking about signing up for Google's corporate email. When we started Telligent we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange SaaS and about 18 months ago moved Exchange in-house to support our 100+ person company. Over the past 18 months it has gotten more difficult to support. For us email is like oxygen. We're a distributed company with people all over the world so email is critical for just about everything we do. When email is not available, we're dead in the water. I am actually a really big fan of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. However, since we've moved Exchange in-house we've now found that we have to do a lot more work to support it: upgrade drive space as we continue to hire; increase processing power and investment in servers for AD; deal with bandwidth issues if Internet is down in the office; general IT support for managing and running the server; and lastly SPAM (note: we're about to start using Postini for SPAM after going through 2 different hardware solutions). A couple folks have been pushing us to look at Google's corporate email options. There seems to be a lot of benefit and it's only $50/year. At $5,000/year it is much, much less than we spend right now and I really like the idea of freeing up our IT team and the servers. What's the consensus on using Google for corporate email? Posted Mar 13 2008, 11:35 AM by Rob Howard's Blog Filed under: Google

• Telligent Harvest Reporting Server 1.0 now available!

  Harvest provides deep analysis and trending on how people are contributing within a community running on Telligent Community Server. Harvest helps to prove the return on investment by uncovering valuable data, customer insights, and trends that can be studied, understood, and applied directly back to the business. More Details on Harvest Product Overview Harvest can be used to analyze what content is popular in the community - content that can then be turned into FAQs or Knowledge Base articles to help drive down costs from direct phone support. Other great examples include identifying key members of the community that contribute to the communities success. But most importantly Harvest provide deep analytics into user behavior and demographics - more data than can be typically solicited from customer surveys. With this level of data organization can better target individual behavior and patterns with appropriate product offerings or advertising.  Harvest Facts: Included in the Enterprise Edition of Community Server™ 2008 Includes extensible built-in task engine for data extraction, analysis, and data warehousing Compatible with Community Server 2007 and above Developer Facts: Extensible reporting framework allows easy creation of new, custom reports Built on the enterprise-proven Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform and Microsoft SQL Server We've already been asked, "How is Harvest different from Microsoft Reporting Services?" There are 2 key differences between Harvest and SQL Reporting Services: Harvest is designed for public accessibility meaning that it's very easy and simple to expose reporting data so that everyone in the community has access to it. Harvest includes a task engine used to build your data warehouse and can constantly run in the background to provide live analysis without any direct interaction on your OLTP database. A great example: using data from forums.asp.net, which has data dating back to 2001, Harvest can run all manner of reports and trends with no impact to the live forums.asp.net database in 2-3 seconds. More Details on Harvest... Posted Mar 12 2008, 07:48 AM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Graffiti 1.0 Service Pack 1 Now Available

  Today we released Graffiti 1.0 Service Pack 1 Announcement and details here Download here Quite a few things made it into Service Pack 1 - please see the link above for the full details - below is a quick summary: Developer and Designer - we added some new Chalk extensions, some events for developers to plug into so you can process behavior and data more easily in your own code, added support for background threading Security Enhancements - we made a handful of security improvements to ensure that Graffiti is better locked down. This includes some changes related to data discovery and passwords. Migration tools - we updated our migration tools and fixed a few bugs when working with BlogML. Bugs - We fixed about 25-30 bugs that people reported to us after we released version 1.0 So far Graffiti has been really well received! I had a number of people tell me at Mix how much they like Graffiti. Miguel de Icaza even gave Graffiti some love in his Mono talk at Mix -- showing Graffiti running on Mono on stage! Thanks Miguel! Posted Mar 11 2008, 11:03 AM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Graffiti running on Mono

  Ken, of the developers on the Telligent Product team, has been working on Graffiti's Mono support and is now running his public blog on Mono. He claims to be the first public site running Graffiti on Linux - I think he is right :) He also posted some details on what he did and what his configuration looks like. Great job Ken! Posted Mar 06 2008, 07:29 PM by Rob Howard's Blog

• Announcing Telligent Harvest Reporting Server

  Harvest Reporting Server is a powerful but still simple to use business intelligence tool that helps draw out critical information about your Community Server site. We're bundling Harvest with our Enterprise Edition of Community Server but it will be available for $5,000 for Community Server Professional customers. Until March 15th you can pre-purchase Harvest for $999. Harvest is also a fully functional stand-alone Reporting Engine. The current offer includes the Community Server 2007 Report Bundle with over 100 reports on how your Community Server is being used. While version 1.0 is targeted largely at our Community Server customers we're planning on building additional reports and customers of Harvest 1.0 can easily build their own rich, interactive reports too. Note, to use Harvest 1.0 with Community Server you will need to be able to setup a Windows Service and we recommend using a separate database as to not interfere with performance of Community Server. We're on track to ship version 1.0 on March 10th. You can check-out Harvest in action here: http://reports.communityserver.org/demo/ Posted Mar 06 2008, 02:25 AM by Rob Howard's Blog