A couple of month’s ago I did an interview with Sky Radio’s Forbes Business Channel about online communities. The interview will air publicly on American Airlines and NorthWest Airlines in November, but you can download the interview now too (WMA format).
BTW, if you haven’t visited telligent.com lately we just updated the site with a slick new UI.
You can download the slides and demos here:
http://communityserver.org/files/42/robs_files/entry500505.aspx
(reposted from ComponentArt’s Site):
Today ComponentArt is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Telligent Systems Inc., creators of the very popular Community Server product. A managed platform offering moderated discussion forums, blogging capabilities, photo galleries and more – Community Server is the engine that powers some of the advanced collaborative aspects of such websites as Microsoft’s www.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com, and domain registrar GoDaddy.com.
Beginning with the upcoming version 1.2, key aspects of the Community Server user interface will be powered by ComponentArt’s Web.UI suite of controls for ASP.NET.
“Our companies have been working closely for some time to deliver a rich set of features for the new version of Community Server in the areas of U.I. and system management”, says Rob Howard of Telligent. “We’re very excited about the integration of ComponentArt’s U.I. elements; they provide some amazing new capabilities for our customers, and I expect that our use of the Web.UI controls will be even more widespread in upcoming releases”.
ComponentArt is pleased to have the opportunity to showcase the power of the Web.UI user interface controls to the large Community Server customer base – and the company’s customers have also realized direct benefits from the relationship:
“It’s a privilege to be working closely with some of the brightest minds in the industry” says Miljan Braticevic, ComponentArt President. “Several key features of our new Web.UI version 3.0 came about as a direct result of the feedback provided by the Telligent team. Our customers are already enjoying the rewards of this partnership”.
The integration of the Web.UI components into the Community Server product will not affect its existing licensing structure in any way, and additional licensing for Web.UI is not required. Telligent is expected to release the new version 1.2 of Community Server in December 2005.
More information on Community Server and Telligent Systems can be found at www.communityserver.org
and www.telligent.com.
A couple of people have asked to see a demo of our new Ink support. Scott recorded one.
P.S., it also shows off our new control panel.
Today we rolled out ink support for Community Server!
We’ve got some really cool ideas about how we’ll use ink in forums, blogs, and photo galleries.
Other features that went live today:
We also did an update to the (yet to be named) email engine that integrates with Community Server. Lots of bug fixes.
I just wrapped up my presentations at the Heartland Developer Conference. 90 minutes of CodeSmith and 90 minutes of ASP.NET 2.0 tips & tricks — good stuff. I’ll post the link to the slides/downloads tomorrow.
After seeing screen captures and scratching my head thinking, “hmm… my copy of Windows XP doesn’t look like that” Kevin pointed me to the Royale Theme for Windows XP. I like it, but have to admit (it makes it look like a Mac).
Speaking of Macs, we just bought our first Apple for the office for a new designer. It’s weird using the single button mouse and fumbling around in the Mac OS — which I finally gave up on and settled back into my Windows XP OS …must be that “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” thing.
I bumped into Scott Hanselman at the Microsoft MVP summit in Redmond a couple of weeks ago and have added a new toy to my travel bag: Sony PSP. Does this mean I’m a sell-out? Hmm, Stephen thinks so. None of the 4 devices I own run a Windows OS: BlackBerry, iPod, PSP, and a mobile phone that runs Java. Don’t get me wrong. Microsoft makes some great PC products, but it’s mobility products aren’t exactly exciting. Personally I think this is more of the vendors inability to deliver a high-quality device. Microsoft will undoubtly catch-up though, (see XBox).
Want to help us name our new conference rooms for our new office space? So far we’ve got:
We kind of like the language theme, as we currently have C# and VB. It’s weird though, no one ever wants to use the VB room; or as we like to say, “VB, it’s what we use when we can’t use C#” — yes, that’s a JOKE. So don’t flame me 🙂
Tomorrow, October 13th 2005, I’ll be in at the Heartland Developer’s Conference in Cedar Rapids. One presentation on CodeSmith 3.0 and another on ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks. Should be fun!
Tomorrow we’re also doing our normal Thursday update to www.communityserver.org. We’ve got a couple of really cool new features that come on line in this build, including forum personalization.
My favorite little device, aka my CrackBerry (as Kent calls it) appears to be on the ropes: NY Times Article.
A company called NTP (a company whose name must mean: No True Products as they don’t actually make anything) is enforcing a patent enfringement against Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry. Apparently NTP holds several ’email over wireless network’ patents (yes, nothing *but* patents) and the US Court of Appeals has granted NTP an injunction that bans the sale of BlackBerry devices and service in the U.S. SlashDot’ed here.
<sigh /> and I just bought a new BlackBerry to replace the one I just broke about a month ago. Grrr.
Late today we rolled out a new build of Community Server on www.communityserver.org. It’s a pre-release of our 1.2 version due in December and not available for download yet. We update the site every Thursday with the newest build to keep the quality bar high, but today we did a special release for a special new feature we’ve been hard at work on for the past 9 months: email support.
Sure, you’ve always been able to receive email notifications from most forum system, but now with Community Server you can also reply to those mails. You can see some discussions using it here:
http://communityserver.org/forums/499631/ShowPost.aspx
It’s a feature we’re really excited about because we now have merged NNTP, Web base discussions, and Email! Of course with email now there is a lot of interesting new things we can do, e.g. email to blog (and some other cool things we’ll announce later). Of course the cool benefit is in the near future all the forums at forums.asp.net can also act as email lists and you can receive and reply all from your Exchange, Hotmail, GMail, etc. account! This also gives Community Server an awesom offline story now too.
We’ll package the email functionality as a commercial add-on for Community Server, but we’ll also have a usable ‘Community Edition’ designed for people that want to run individual sites and 100% of our commercial software is free for any (not for profit) .NET Community Site.
We’ve also been busy adding some of the Dozing Dog CMS capabilities into Community Server (and to be clear we don’t view Community Server as a portal, rather something that is added to portal system such as SharePoint). You can view a flash movie here (served from our new file gallery):
http://communityserver.org/files/42/robs_files/entry498958.aspx
This is a pretty innovative feature we’ve added that makes editing the site content unbelievably easy. No special tools, no special admin screens… just click and edit. Of course it’s using some wonderful AJAX functionality. We’ve also completely re-written the backend Control Panel of Community Server (more about that later… another special surprise in store there 🙂 ).
Anyhow, if you haven’t visited www.communityserver.org lately we’ve been quite busy. I’ll share more later…
P.S., I intent to write and article for my MSDN ASP.NET column that shows exactly how we did the AJAX content editing functionality (as always we provide all the source for Community Server), but the article won’t be out until December 🙁 …credit the functionality to Scott Watermasysk the CS team lead who actually wrote this on a whim at the MVP summit.
James shared the news here: http://www.coveryourasp.net/Technical/TheTelligenti, but we’re thrilled to announce that Telligent has acquired this popular and powerful CMS system. We haven’t announced how we’ll package the new CMS solution with Community Server, but version 1.2 will contain some basic CMS capablities. Version 2.0 of Community Server will also have full integration of the CMS system.
This year’s PDC will be really fun. No really, I mean it! Not only will the content be excellent, but as an individual who has been to many, many PDCs I’m excited to go to one as an attendee/exhibitor 🙂
CodeSmith Tools is an exhibitor at PDC this year. Stop by our booth to learn why CodeSmith is the most powerful code generation tool available and register to win a free copy of CodeSmith Professional (a $399 value) and pick up a CodeSmith t-shirt.
See you in Los Angeles!
