Author: Mark

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.

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. 

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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…

Graffiti 1.0 Service Pack 1 Now Available

Today we released Graffiti 1.0 Service Pack 1

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!

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.

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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/

Graffiti 1.0 Now Available!

Graffiti 1.0 is out the door! You can download it here:

http://get.graffiticms.com/

Graffiti is a lightweight, simple content publishing system you can use to quickly and easily publish a blog or an entire web site. It blends together traditional CMS tools like revision history and workflow with more modern blog-style publishing. Graffiti is available as both a free Express Edition as well as several commercial editions.

We’re also happy to announce the new Graffiti Marketplace where you can download new themes and functionality for your Graffiti site. We’ve already published several themes that were created for Graffiti 1.0. You can also browse and install new features from the Graffiti Marketplace all within Graffiti itself!

Thanks to everyone at Telligent as well as all of our beta testers and customers that have taken the time to try out this new product.

Building software is easy. Building easy to use software is hard. We think Graffiti is in the latter category. The team has spent countless hours working to make Graffiti really simple and intuitive.  We really hope you enjoy Graffiti!

Frequent Questions:

What is required to run Graffiti?

Graffiti requires Microsoft .NET 2.0 or later running on Windows or Mono* running on Windows, Linux, Apple, etc. Graffiti uses VistaDB as the default database but also support Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, and MySQL. More details here.

* additional announcements around Mono support are forthcoming. Full support of Mono should be available in the next release of Mono (1.9?) although Graffiti 1.0 has been tested with Mono v1.2.6.

How do Graffiti and Community Server work together?

They don’t. Graffiti is optimized for individuals and small groups whereas Community Server is optimized for large Enterprise social networking sites. For example, if you are running a single blog Graffiti is better. If you are managing more than 1 blog Community Server is better.

Is Graffiti free?

Graffiti is available as both a commercially supported product ($399 for 10 user license) as well as a free Express Edition designed for individuals.

How does user licensing work?

A license is required for each user that wants to publish content within Graffiti. There are no limits to the number of readers!

I bought a pre-release license to Graffiti, when do I get my license?

We’re sending emails to everyone that pre-purchased a Graffiti license. You should receive your email within the next 24 hours. If you don’t, please email me: rhoward@telligent.com

What is coming in the next release of Graffiti?

Stay tuned to graffiticms.com for details 🙂

Community Server 2008, Beta 1

Come and get it! Beta 1 of Community Server 2008 is now available:

Below is a brief list of what you’ll find in this Beta:

  • Groups. We’ve added support for private and public groups that support their own membership, blog, forum, gallery, and pages. You can now easily create mini-communities for friends or for your team.
  • Web Services APIs. Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services layer for working with Community Server. This makes it even easier to share data from within Community Server with other applications or tools. The Web Services implementation is a RESTful implementation and we also include a client library to include within applications that need to talk to Community Server.
  • Friends. We’ve completely overhauled the friends functionality to make it easier to both manage and add friends. You’ll find the friends behavior much more like FaceBook’s friend functionality.
  • Media Gallery. We’ve merged the Photo/File Galleries into a single Media Gallery application. The Media Gallery includes viewers for rendering images, audio, video making it even easier to share content in your community.
  • Message Streams. New to Community Server is a message stream application that enables multi-user conversations (formerly private messages), social streams (similar to FaceBook), profile comments, and more.
  • Enterprise File Storage. We’ve completely overhauled file storage so all files are in a Centralized File Store (includes both a File System and Amazon S3 provider).
  • Widgets. Community Server now support shareable widgets in all sidebars.
  • Simplified Permissions. We’ve tried to simplify the rich permissions functionality that Community Server has always been known for. All the previous permissions capabilities still exist, but we’ve added some tools to make it even easier to manage and apply permissions.
  • User Experience. We’ve started to introduce some new user experiences in both the Control Panel and other aspects of the site. When Community Server 2008 ships you’ll find a much friendly and beautiful experience for both running and managing your community.

Many, many additional new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

As always, we value your feedback!

Announcing Graffiti Beta 2

We’re happy to announce that Graffiti Beta 2 is now available!

Download now!

Yes, originally we planned on launching version 1.0 on January 15th. We decided to instead release a second beta so we could make sure that we really nailed all the scenarios and features added since Beta 1.

Here’s what’s been done/added:

  • New databases supported – VistaDB replaces Microsoft Access used to store your content. VistaDB is supported in both Microsoft’s .NET and Novell’s Mono. VistaDB also still enables no-setup (copy/paste) deployment of Graffiti. In addition to adding VistaDB support we’ve also added support for MySQL. Lastly, we’ve done the work to enable case sensitive databases. Graffiti supports: VistaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL.
  • Lots of bug fixes and improvements – we’ve fixed over 100 bugs that people reported or requested that we change. In some cases it was simple things that we just didn’t get to in Beta 1, like: deleting categories and custom fields..
  • Data Migration tool – See the readme for details, but we make it really easy to move from Beta 1’s Access environment to any of the new databases supported in Beta 2. Additionally this tool can be used at anytime to change the database you are using for Graffiti.
  • New Features – we’ve added a few new features based largely on your feedback. Features such as “variables” which allow you to do some really interesting new things Templates. We’ll publish more about these features on the Graffiti blog.
  • Better support for all browsers – our WYSIWYG editor in the administration has been updated to have awesome support for all browsers (not just FireFox): IE, Safari, Camino, and Opera.
  • Tools for controlling sort order – We’ve added some drag-and-drop tools to make it really easy to create/define your own custom sort order for content. This is especially important when using Graffiti as a CMS.
  • Support for IIS 7 – We didn’t test Graffiti Beta 1 with IIS 7 – and boy did we hear about it! We’re pleased to say that Graffiti Beta 2 works great with IIS 7. 
  • Versioning support added for Themes – We’ve added version support for themes, so now you can make changes, review them and easily revert back to what you used to have.

Of course there is a lot more in Beta 2, but we want you to have fun finding some of the great new features!

P.S., Graffiti Beta 2 does not work with Mono yet. Hopefully this will be finalized when we release next month!

P.P.S., You can still pre-purchase Graffiti during Beta 2 at the introductory price of $99.