Author: Mark

As I mentioned this weekend our interns have been working on a reporting framework for Community Server. The reporting application requires a separate database as it reads from an existing CS database (incrementally) and then re-organizes the data into a data structure designed for reporting.

Some details and screenshots below:

• Over 50 reports covering all aspects of Community Server (Blogs, Forums, Photos, Files, and more)
• Displays many reports using interactive Flash graphs
• Includes many “Top <x>” style reports, as well as the ability to drill-down and see the full details of the report
• Allows users to export any report/data into CSV/Excel format
• Allows users to filter data based on given date ranges
• Simple tasks to handle migrating and crunching of Community Server data
• Migration tasks can be easily segregated by application type and function
• Data can be migrated both incrementally or completely
• Extendable, flexible reporting framework! Completely customizable
• Ability to create new reports either programmatically via the API, or declaratively in configuration files
• Customizable report layouts allow users to easily change the way reports are displayed or shown
• Full web-based management of reports (adding, editing, disabling/enabling, etc…)

Chart from Blog Popularity Report (weblogs.asp.net for past 3 months)

Report from Blog Popularity (weblogs.asp.net for past 3 months):

Below are some of the reports that are supported:

Blogs:

• Average Posts Per Blog
• Blog Comments
• Blogging Frequency per Blog
• Blog Posts Created
• Blog Views
• Highest Rated Blogs
• Most Popular Blogs
• Posts Per Category
• Rss Subscriptions Per Blog
• Total Posts

Forums:

• Most Replied To Topics
• New Users
• New Forum Posts
• Average Post to User Ratio
• Posts by Language / Country
• Most Active Forums
• Average Post Frequency
• Active and Inactive Users
• Inactive Threads
• Moderation Statistics

The framework also make it really easy to add new reports either as stand-alone assemblies (for more advanced reports) or expressed through simple XML syntax that can just be plugged in.

Posting these links because they are ones I use often (and always end up hunting down in my browser history): 

Color Match 10k: http://www.nickherman.com/colormatch/

Color Blender: http://colorblender.com/ 

http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/07/memcached

This might be worth looking into — and yes there is even a Win32 port. For the ASP.NET developer it’s essentially a middle tier caching layer replacement for the built-in Cache object.

By my standards we spend an exorbitant amount of money with Google on advertising between Community Server, CodeSmith, and JobBurner.com. To put this in perspective we’ll spend more in a day with Google than we spend in a month for Live.com and Yahoo.com combined!. The worst part is Google makes it really, really easy to spend money on ads (they automate billing in small increments you’re often times not thinking of the total cost).

Google offers 2 options for advertisors:

• Search ads – go to google.com, search for something and ads are shown on the top and right (these work great)
• Content Network ads – ads are shown on affiliate sites. The ads shown are relevant to the content of the pages the ads are shown on.

Recently we stopped using Google’s content network for ads. Why? Well Google also has the ability to track conversions on your site. When someone clicks on your ad and then goes to some page on your site (like “download”) Google can track conversions. For our content ad network we’ve seen a trend over the past year of high-clicks and low-conversions.

Sites in the Content Network get paid when people click on the ads they host. It’s how some sites make a lot of money. By as an advertiser with Google on their Content Network its felt more like a money pit lately – and some of the sites our ads were being shown on weren’t even related to what we were marketing. My suspicion is that more and more people are starting to game these sites. Yes we could change our ad strategy and pick the sites we wanted to advertise on, but isn’t part of Google’s pitch the fact that they do these ‘smart’ things for you?

Our interns have been hard at work on the Enterprise Reporting tools for Community Server. I hope that in the next 6-8 weeks we can possibly roll the reports out on weblogs.asp.net. More details to come…

Most interesting stat so far?

Scott Guthrie’s blog received about 2mm web views last year and ~8mm blog reader views and those are only the ones that we were able to count! I’ll share some screen shots (graphs, reports, and more) this weekend of what it looks like so far.
 

Blogs are great, but following a conversation through comments sucks. Email is one way to solve this problem and cocomment.com is another option. Right now the best solution that I’ve found seems to be Google Alerts — hoping that it stumbles across keywords you care about. But there has to be a better way…

Yes, we’re finally getting into this whole video blogging thing! We’ve released ~5 video-casts now (we’re trying to release one per-week).Our most recent episode has an interview with Wyatt from the CS developer team about the Wrox Community Server book. 

You can also watch the Telligent Rock-off where Jason (our CTO) and his band of interns jam out on guitar hero with judging by our esteemed panel. Rumor has it there was even a visit from Cardboard Rob [1].

[1] To help celebrate Telligent’s 3 year anniversary Tom Edwards (our resident practical joker) created “Cardboard Rob” with some help from the folks over at ComponentArt. …if you have ideas for how I can get even, please let me know.

We ran out of desks here in our Dallas office so we thought we’d have a contest to see which of our interns would get a desk vs. a folding table.

The contest was guitar hero.Below are a couple of photos as our 6 interns went head-to-head:

 

Kevin, above (in the blue t-shirt) lost. Sorry Kevin, looks like you get the card table. 

The interns are doing an amazing job building out a new reporting service for Community Server. I’ll post some details about that in the future. 

I’ve run across several different mobile device emulators, including a couple from Microsoft, but what do people that are doing serious mobile development use?

Josh Ledgard starts at Telligent tomorrow and will help lead an exciting new area of our business: “managed communities”. Josh has been a community thought leader at Microsoft and has helped shepherd and shape many of the popular communities experiences that have made Microsoft’s communities so successful. We’re excited to have him on board!

P.S., we’re still hiring!