blog

I feel violated. My home network has this nasty new device hooked up to it that I really, really like: Control 4 Home Automation System. I get as many remotes as I want and they all work over my wireless network and pretty much can control everything in the house from the iPod, lights, radio, t.v., etc. It's really freaking cool.

Yesterday when it was being installed I noticed the technicians were using their laptops to configure everything from their Windows XP laptops. So being the geek I am I start asking how things work and that's when they broke the bad news to me, "Sure, see that small box right there? It's a Linux server that is running all the home automation."

They even told me that I can login from anywhere on the Internet and "run my house". Scary, can't wait to see what the viruses for these systems are going to look like. Imagine what could be done if your home automation system got hacked!

Great, not only do I have something I don't trust hooked up to my network it's responsible for all my geek joy; and to make matters worse, it's easy to use and I really, really like it.

Just in time for the political season MSNBC launches a new Community Server blog First Read: The Day in Politics. It looks like they have several editors updating the blog every couple of hours.

It's definitely great to see news organizations using blogs more and more as the tool to communicate with their audiences. I'm sure newspapers are hating this since news gets published immediately instead of once a day.

Today we're soft-launching Sound Creative (more details here) a new design business. No website yet… cobbler's children have no shoes thing 🙂

We've been building and growing a creative staff internally at Telligent to bring our customers great design to accompnay their custom software solutions. About 3 months ago we decided to run our creative team as a separate business, giving them the opportunity to go after other types of design work vs. web only.

Over the next year you will see more and more of Telligent's services and products rolled out with a heavy influence from Sound Creative. In addition to pure UI work the team also has an XHTML/CSS expertise to ensure our services and products output great markup.

The end goal is to help ensure our customers not only receive agency quality design work, but also have a strong technology partner to implement the interactive design.

You can download the overview PDF here:

http://communityserver.org/files/folders/547660/download.aspx

A couple of people emailed me completely surprised after I mentioned in this post that Telligent didn't have any venture captial companies funding us.

I've worked with a lot of venture captialists over the years and still keep in contact with a few of them – and we've had several VCs contact us about funding 'interest'. VCs are a mixed blessing, you get money to spend on making your idea real but you give up a lot of control.

When I was at Microsoft working as a Technical Evangelist in the Developer Relations Group in the late 90s I spent a lot of time with start-ups. My job, back then, was to convince these start-ups that they should use the Microsoft platform; which was not an easy task when all we had to offer was ASP, COM, MTS, etc. the platform just wasn't there. It was a huge uphill battle, but that's what made if fun. A lot of these companies we talked to were funded by VCs and while a handful succeeded, the great majority were quickly run into the ground.

Why were they run into the ground? My personal opinion, and from talking with the people that worked at those companies, is that the VCs were shooting for a 'pop'. In other words, fund 15-25 ideas and hope for one home run. When you run the numbers on this it statistically makes sense. The home runs were awesome to watch, these companies would go public, people became silly rich (on paper), and then of course the bubble burst and we all know what happened. On the other hand the other companies that didn't make it would disapper, along with their ideas. The burn rates were insane though as money was pumped into these ideas, some good / some just plain dumb (I won't name names!).

A lot of this has certainly changed in recent years as VCs now look more towards long-term value vs. immediate return on investment. However, we decided early on at Telligent that we would focus on building a sustainable, slow-growth, organic business. In other words, instead of trying to hit home runs on every swing we're happy with slowly hitting consistent single base runs. So in many ways you could also say Telligent is the exact opposite kind of investment that a VC typically looks for.

Will Telligent ever take VC money? Who knows. 37Signals did, and they said they never would. It really just depends on the opportunity.

We've been spending a bunch of time updating our documentation for Community Server lately. The content is great, but the UI is a little iffy still — we're planning on doing an update to the UI in the coming weeks.

In addition to our own documentation we've been working closely with Wrox and Packt on two Community Server books due out in the next several months. The book from Packt will be focused more on using Community Server while Wrox's book is more about developing with Community Server.

The only one listed on Amazon right now is Wrox's book: Professional Community Server written by Wyatt Preul. While neither author worked for Telligent when they began these projects, we did just hire Wyatt. Wyatt is starting off as tester on Scott's team and will be helping get more unit testing into our automated build process. He is also going to work on a new "black-ops" project that we're hoping to roll out later this year.

Tags are a great way to push a site's ontology definition onto the responsibility of the reader. However, much like everything else it gets abused. We've had a lot of questions lately from people asking if tags should support moderation. Tags already support editing in our control panel, but really how much control should a site take over how the sites users are using tags.

Thoughts/comments?

Today we rolled out a new offering for Community Server: Community Server Hosted Edition.

With no download, no setup, and no configuration Community Server Hosted Edition enables organizations to create a professional web community in less than 5 minutes. We decided to start offering this about 3 months ago after hearing from a number of non-technical people/organizations that wanted to get a basic Community Server site up-and-running as quickly as possible.

Over the coming months we're going to roll-out a number of new capabilities on this site. For example, integrated email, new themes, as well as a few other tricks we have up our sleeves (including a potential free ad-enabled version).

The Community Server team has already started working on version 3.0 of Community Server (we just shipped version 2.1 in August).

We chose to use the name "Calypso" as our codename for the 3.0 release. If you've never heard of Calypso before it was the codename for the framework used to run the www.asp.net site (a mutated version of the IBuySpy Portal). Our goal with Calypso is to continue to focus on simplicity and usability. We've made a lot of improvements in our 2.1 version, but there is still a lot more we can do. Similar to version 2.0, a complete pass will be made through the application focused on simplifying common tasks, building more wizards, and adding more help oriented content. More integration work across base features will also be done.

The Community Server 3.0 platform will also only run on version 2.0 of Microsoft's ASP.NET framework, unlike version 2.0 which ran on both version 1.1 and 2.0 of Microsoft's ASP.NET framework.

We have 5 specific features areas we will focus on

• Chameleon, our Theme Engine overhaul, will deliver a simpler way to create themes. It will also include features that will enable users to manage the look/feel of a theme via the Control Panel. Our goals are to reduce (by updwards of 90%) the number of files involved in skinning a blog and to provide a stream-lined non-technical set of tools for easily creating UI. 
• Morpheus, our Membership update, will break the hard-wired ties to the ASP.NET 2.0 membership store. This will allow for easier integration with existing user bases and external storage of membership data.
• Zion, a new Centralized File Storage system, will provide more consistent and extensible support for files and attachments in Community Server. In addition, the update to Blogs will allow for better image/file support on a per post basis.
• Tallyman, the next version of Mail Gateway, will enable anyone, anywhere, including shared hosting and smaller sites, to leverage integrated email and mail list functionality within Community Server.
• Mystique…something we'll talk more about later 🙂

In addition to the work on Community Server 3.0 we will also announce some exciting new software offerings around knowledge management, content management, and case management.

Calypso is planned for release in the first quarter of 2007.

Seth Godin talks about "things that are broken" in this video.

Seth wrote Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside (along with several other books). Both books have been floating around our office since Scott started reading them.

He is an entertaining speaker, but also has a lot of good gems for people thinking about building and marketing software/technology. Our industry doesn't seem to be his focus, but it always seems that software/technology always has the most room for improvements!

I'm getting ready to move (again) and was cleaning out my home office closet and found a few fun things from my days at Microsoft.

You should be able to click on the images for more detailed close-ups.

Microsoft Brainwash – I forget where I got this, but yes it's real! I think they make you drink this when you join. It's funny, when I joined Microsoft I do remember being herded off a special building and being indocrinated with dim lights, candles, chanting, black robes, etc. The next several weeks were a blur, but it seemed afterwards I couldn't remember anything about other technologies I used to work with (Perl, Cold Fusion, Sybase, Power Builder, etc.) and suddenly Bill Gates was my life-long hero. Very, very odd.

New hire mug – every new hire gets a Microsoft coffee mug. It's a secret, people in Seattle really don't drink water. They only drink coffee. Really! You turn on the taps in bathrooms at Microsoft (because you never really get to leave) and a pure java from Starbucks comes out. Actually at Microsoft they have really, really crappy free coffee, but oddly enough also have Starbucks on campus which you pay for. Sigh.

Yes, mine new hire mug has seen better days — the chips are from stress when I would chew on my mug (when there were no nails available).

A pen or a clock? Yes, after 5 long years of service you finally get the prize: your choice of a clock or a pen. P.S. the clock *is* the preferred choice. By displaying the clock in your office you automatically received +10 dexterity and intelligence points for any feature discussions.

Your own personal rock collection – (1) Think of something really, really cool (like database cache invalidation) that developers will just love, (2) next bring in really well paid attorneys and explain what you created (3) take lots of strong narcotics to keep you awake while they take your really simple, cool idea and turn it into 30+ pages of legal mumbo-jumbo (that should be a WHOLE other blog post) (4) get a rock with your name and idea on it (5) the person with the most rocks wins.

P.S. when I left the 'rock collection award' was Scott Guthrie. I think he had a secret granite mine underneath his desk, but that's just me…

P.S.S., patent cubes also make excellent weapons to hurl at people when they don't agree with your ideas. Logically the person with the most rocks would win.

There is more, including a roll of oddly inscribed toilet paper with Sun marketing literature on it — gee, I wonder what that was for? I guess the original idea was to paper Scott's house. Nah, that couldn't be it…