Author: Mark

Community Server add-ons

Tonight I’m presenting on Community Server 1.0 at the Plano .NET User’s Group.

I’ll be showing off two new features that Ken has been working on — his site is running Community Server 1.0 btw and shows how easy it is to customize the platform:

  • FTP Server – We’ve written an FTP server that integrates into the Community Server database. Unlike the awesome FTP server that ships with IIS, our FTP’s access is controlled by the Community Server membership. Currently we’ve built this feature to make working with our Photo gallery super easy — just FTP photos to your server. Eventually we’ll be expanding this out to solve generic shared file storage on the Internet.
  • NNTP Server – We’ve written an NNTP server for Community Server too! Once we start running Community Server on www.asp.net it means that you can read/post to the www.asp.net/forums from your favorite news reader all the while honoring permissions for what you can/can’t see via your Communtiy Server permissions. A feature like this is great for me. If I’m travelling I can sync all the messages, reply, on the plane, and the have those messages posted when I land! Posts made through NNTP are still associated with the user’s profile too…

Tonight I’ll be demo’ing both of these capabilties. We’re also working on an Email server too, but it’s not quite ready to demo yet.

 

Web Based Installer for Community Server

Scott posted some details on our web based installer for Community Server.

If you’re like me you pass judgement on an application in the first few minutes. If setup goes bad, well it’s all pretty much downhill from there. It was key for us to make sure setup was super, brain-dead easy. What’s great about the web based installer is that for hosted applications you can simply FTP the files to your server and run the web based installer.

We’re close to pushing out the RC of Community Server now. We passed around an internal build within Telligent (hard to believe we’re up to nearly 15 people now) to get some initial feedback and make sure there were no oddities with the RC1 build. So far so good — stay tuned to www.communityserver.org although I’m sure you’ll see a lot of blog posts about it.

Plano .NET User’s Group

This Thursday I’m giving a presentation at the Plano .NET User’s Group (PDNUG) the topic is: Building Community Server 1.0.

Below is the topic description:

In this talk we’ll take a tour of Community Server 1.0 from how the project team is setup to a drill down into the source code. Community Server is a knowledge management and collaboration platform that combines best of breed .NET applications to deliver one platform that eases development of online collaborative communities.

Most of the session will be spent digging into the source code. Any slides will be published at www.rob-howard.net after the presentation. We’ll also hopefully have our first Release Candidate out within the next 24 hours too 🙂

Measuring the success of a community

Today someone asked me how you measure the success of an online blog/forum community. Below are some of the ideas I replied with:

1. The simple measurements:

  • Total Subscribers – how many people are syndicating your content or active in your forums
  • Blog Feedback – how many comments and feedback is generated by the blog
  • Page impressions – how many total views of the web pages
  • New users/day – how many new users join the community daily

2. More complex measurements

  • Press quotes – how many press references are made that refer to your site (print & online)
  • Total bloggers – this is hard to measure because it’s really only valuable if the people are contributing frequently
  • Self sustaining – does the community manage itself, i.e. do members of the community help manage and grow the community

Of course I think there are a ton of other micro-metrics you can measure, e.g. do you develop personas such as MVPs or ‘uber’ contributors, but I think the above provides a good snap-shot of the success/failure. But, if you’ve got more ideas for how you think a successful community is measured speak up!

Dependence on Technology

So here I am. Day 3 of ComCast (national Internet and Cable provider here in the U.S.) being down again. I’ve been able to manage it by taking my laptop to one of 10 million Starbucks and use the wireless t-mobile access, but it’s still frustrating. It also tells me that the ‘Internet’ is not yet considered a utility like cable T.V., phone, or more importantly electricity!

 

My gripe is: for me it is a utility. I expect it to be up all the time, not just here and there. What’s more frustrating is when talking to support it’s always 2-3 days before a tech. can come out. Argh!

 

There is an upside though — I’m able to catch up on a bunch of DVR recorded T.V. shows: Alias, Lost, 24 and am able to slug through email uninterrupted. Well, at least as uninterrupted as watching 24 while writing this blog post in Word (thank goodness for DVRs)!

 

…Woohoo, I’m off to post – thank goodness for neighbors with DSL and unencrypted wireless networks 🙂

 

P.S., thanks for all the great comments on my MSDN article (below) — as always if there are other topics you’d like to see, please let me know!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/01/ASPNETPerformance/

Here we grow again :)

Telligent is growing and we’re looking for some more people to add to our team. Below is our latest opening:

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Want to work on a high energy, customer focused team? Telligent has an open position for a director of sales & marketing. The ideal candidate should be entrepreneurial, self-managing, comfortable working in a non-traditional environment (flex-time, etc.), and most importantly display a passion for customers and their success with our products and services.

 

The expectations of this role would be: managing a sales pipeline, identifying new sales channels, creating marketing literature (both online and hardcopy), helping manage pre-sales customer interactions, working with product and services teams to identify opportunities, and helping build future sales, marketing, and account management team(s).

 

Background or educational credentials in marketing or sales is desirable, but not required. Creative ideas, out of the box thinking, a desire to ‘do it better’, and enjoying what you do are requirements.

 

Candidates living in the Dallas, TX (or nearby) are preferred but not required.

 

Please send inquiries to careers @ telligentsystems.com. Please include:

 

  1. Copy of your resume
  2. A couple of paragraphs on why you are the ideal candidate (past experience, etc.)
  3. Optional – please share any experiences with customers that demonstrate your ability to ‘win’ the heart and mind of the customer.

New Year’s resolution

…at least one of them is to start blogging more 🙂

The last 6 months starting and growing Telligent has just been insane; not just for me but our entire team. I’ve been envious that Scott Watermasysk is still able to blog so much!

The upside to the lack of blogging is that we’ve made some HUGE advancements in Community Server and hopefully this week we’ll be updating www.communityserver.org to the latest version of the 1.0 beta. We’re down to less than 7 bugs (woo hoo!). Our goal with version 1.0 is to introduce a solid, easy to install platform that others can build on top of – so far so good, we’ve been pretty succesful at signing up some large corporate customers. We’re also building a lot of tools that make the system even better, example a commercial add-on that we’ll be introducing is an FTP server for our Photo Gallery (soon to support any file types). Unlike other photo galleries that use proprietary tools to upload pictures and manage content, we’ll have a FTP server — allowing people to control access and permissions through Community Server and do bulk uploads through IE. Exciting stuff 🙂

I’ve been reading a great book that my friends on the Patterns & Practices team sent me, Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability. J.D. Meier is one of the authors (and a buddy of my from the Site Server 3.0 days of Personalization and Membership) and he and the rest of the writing team did an awesome job. Web application performance is one of my favorite topics and this book hits all the right points — and even better a few new ones I didn’t know. This book goes next to my other favorite book: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Performance Optimization and Tuning Handbook — a must own.

P.S., if you’re in Dallas: on January 13th I’m presenting an advanced ASP.NET Tips & Tricks topic at the Dallas .NET User’s Group. Should be a good talk 🙂

Have a great New Year!

Positions at Telligent Systems

Interested in working with some great people and the latest and greatest technologies from Microsoft? Want to build one of the first public ASP.NET sites with ASP.NET 2.0? We’re looking to grow our team in the next 6-8 weeks. Specifically we’re building some high profile ASP.NET 2.0 solutions and are looking to fill two positions:

Technical Program Manager
This position will focus on owning high visibility ASP.NET projects from planning, development, testing, to completion (including maintenance/support mode). Specific responsibilities will include: collecting customer requirements, driving features, working with customers to understand how to apply technology to solve problems, writing design specifications, working with the development team. You will also participate in community activities ranging from presenting at conference and software design previews, to building samples and answering online questions from customers. Good communication skills and the ability to work effectively outside a normal office (work from your home) are critical to the success of this position. Minimum 2 years experience with ASP.NET is a requirement, experience with ASP.NET 2.0 and C# is strongly desirable. Previous Program Management experience and a BA/BS in Computer Science or a related technical field is preferred. This candidate must demonstrate the ability to manage schedules, virtual teams, and interactions with customers.

Senior Developer/Architect
This position will focus on building multi-server, secure, high-scale, high-availability web applications using the latest Microsoft .NET 2.0 technologies. Responsibilities will include working with the program management team and customer(s) to drive features and specifications, architecture design, implementation, and other software development responsibilities. Good communication skills and the ability to work effectively outside a normal office (work from your home) are critical to the success of this position. Minimum 4 years experience with C# and .NET development is a requirement, experience with Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and SQL Server is strongly desirable. Experience managing a development team is a preferred as is a BA/BS in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Please send mail to careers@telligentsystems.com if you are interested in any of the positions listed above. Please include a resume in either .DOC or .PDF format. Please list any specific qualifications as well as the position interested in within the body of the email. Candidates will be contacted within the next 5-6 weeks.