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Wow, time flies. Tomorrow I’m headed to Milwaukee, WI for the Deeper in .NET event. It should be a great event!

I’m presenting: Blackbelt ASP.NET Tips & Tricks based off my TechEd 2004 Europe DEV310 Talk.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of two new add-ons for Community Server that are now available for public beta.

These are commercial add-ons based on per-session licenses. Both the Professional and Enterprise offerings of the commercial version of Community Server will include user licenses for these add-ons.

Important: both betas will expire on April 18th.

Community Server, NNTP Server (Beta 1)

The Community Server NNTP Server allows you to connect to a Community Server system using any RFC compliant NNTP newsreader, such as Microsoft’s Outlook Express.

Download Community Server NNTP Server (Beta 1) Now

You can see the Community Server, NNTP Server (Beta1) in action by opening Outlook Express and connecting to news://communityserver.org. You can connect annonymously or use the same credentials for logging on to www.communityserver.org.

Community Server, FTP Server (Beta 1)

The Community Server FTP Server allows you to connect to a Community Server system using any RFC compliant FTP client, such as the FTP client built into Internet Explorer. Using the FTP client you can access a virtualized file system — currently only image file types – but we will soon enable multiple file types.

Community Server, FTP Server will allow applications to easily offer secure FTP services without requiring Windows credentials for each user. Additionally, using the web based interfaces files can be rated, commented on, and statistics such as downloads and views easily tracked.

Download Community Server FTP Server (Beta 1) Now

Last Friday I announced Community Server 1.0 was available for download along with some of our goals and objectives for v1.1:

Download here

Today we’re pleased to announce the availability of the Community Server 1.0 source code

Download here

Both were released under Telligent’s Community License, the EULA of which is included in the distribution. This license allows you to do anything you wish the code but requires displaying the following image at the bottom of any web pages that use Community Server functionality. Our commercial versions have no such restrictions. Buy purchasing commercial versions you’re helping make the product even better.

We have started a documentation Wiki with information about setup, installation, and APIs here:

http://docs.communityserver.org

To learn more, ask questions, or contribute please visit www.communityserver.org.

Interesting read I found while perusing Jason’s blog:

Google’s Autolink Feature

Here’s what it does: when the Google toolbar is installed and when the autolink feature is enabled Google will hunt through your requested web page and auto-link content for you, e.g. given an ISBN number it might autolink you to Amazon.com. It’s a neat idea and somthing Microsoft tried with Smart Tags a couple of years ago and I’m sure it has all kinds of revenue opportunties for Google: instead of buying ad words in search engines you can buy ad words on any web site!

From a technology perspective: cool idea! From a consumer perspective it sends up all kinds of red flags. What’s next replacing existing URLs? Honestly, how hard would it be? …and most consumers would be none the wiser. Google could sell your every click.

Tomorrow night I’m presenting at the Vermont .NET User’s Group run by my friend Julie Lerman. The session is ‘Blackbelt ASP.NET Tips & Tricks’ which contains similar content to an MSDN article I wrote a couple of months ago. Julie asked me to sneak in some ASP.NET 2.0 content too 🙂

I’ve never been to Vermont. Julie originally convinced me that we’d be able to sneak in some snowboarding while I was there, but like most of the trips I take it’s going to be another in-and-out visit.

Friday February 18th was a big day for us at Telligent. Not only did we finally ship Community Server 1.0 but we also moved into our new offices!

Jason took some photos and posted them here – using Community Server’s photo gallery feature 🙂

http://www.communityserver.org/photos/telligent/category1003.aspx

We modeled the office after Microsoft’s offices at the Redmond campus:

1. Everyone gets an actual office — no cubicles

2. Big conference rooms with whiteboards

3. Extra wide halls with whiteboards in the hallways

4. Dedicated room for strategic planning, analysis, and competitive research XBox (of course!).

Our furniture was supposed to be delivered on Friday, but building politics won out: we couldn’t move furniture between 8AM and 5PM and we had to resort to cardboard tables. Being true geeks we didn’t care — just give me a wireless network, power, and a place to sit (in that order) and it’s all good!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks!

Scott beat me to it, but after months of cajoling we convinced Alex Lowe to join Telligent. Alex was previously a developer evangelist working for Microsoft and before that was one of the key community people in the ASP.NET space. In his new role with Telligent Alex is going to take on managment on the www.asp.net site.

Today we also opened our office here in Dallas, TX USA. We’ll post pictures soon, but we have already been trying to come up with names for our conference/game rooms. The game room name is a no brainer: Halo (what else could a bunch of geeked out developers think of for a name!). As for the 2 main conference rooms we’re biased and so far ‘C#‘ and ‘ASP.NET‘ seem appropriate.

Lastly, we’re still hiring developers (+1 if you live in Dallas). We’ll post some job descriptions this next week — but we are primarily looking for developers. 

I’m thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Community Server version 1.0:

Download Now!

We will release the source code within the coming days, we have also begun work on version 1.1. The theme for version 1.1 is:

• Performance – we intend to run both www.asp.net/forums and blogs.msdn.com on Community Server. Today these sites serve millions of users on the same 2 web servers and single database server. We’ve introduced new architecture into Community Server and we expect performance and scale to be better overall, but we know we’ll identify some new issues with these high traffic sites.
• Simplification – We want to focus on simplifying the platform. We are going to introduce more wizard as well making the administration UI even more user friendly.
• Quality – A big goal for Community Server was to release a product that was of very, very high quality. We are shipping with defects – actually about 50 that we know about – but most are minor and have acceptable workarounds. We fixed over 900 bugs (that we tracked). Our goal for 1.1 is to make the platform even better than 1.1.

We also intend to move to shorter release cycles. There will be breaking changes to APIs between versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2. After 1.2 the APIs in Community Server will be locked. By locking the APIs in 1.2 we can provide smoother non-breaking upgrade paths.

We also will begin – when our already busy schedule permits – moving back into a mode where we enable participation in the development by people other than those employeed by Telligent.

Lastly, I’d just like to personally say thank you to our team for working some insane hours over the last 8 months and everyone in the community that believed that we were doing the right think with what was ASP.NET Forums, .Text, and nGallery. It’s been a tremendous amount of effort but I can say with confidence that Community Server version 1.0 brings the best of its legacy together and has greatly improved it.

Should be a great event with some great presenters!

One of our big goals at Telligent was to have our Community Server product be disruptive and change the way people work within communitites. I’m happy to announce one of our newest projects (at end of the post).

For a long time one of my biggest frustrations with online communitites is that they are grouped around technology and rather than the technology being the enabler it ends up defining the community. For example, take a look at the ASP.NET community. It’s a vibrant, active community with many participants. From an interactivity perspetive there are 3 ways most people participate: web based forums, email discussion lists, and the Microsoft NNTP news groups. However, each of these communities is distinct because of the individuals preference for the technology.

Each technology has postivies and negatives:

• Forums – positives: rich experience, identity, security, moderation, profiles, search, archive; negatives: must be connected, lack of rich tools, web interface.
• Email lists – positives: comes right to your inbox, offline support, can be moderated; negatives: lack of identity, search, lots of repeat information, lack of easy archivability (or discovery of the archive).
• NNTP – positives: fast, light, simple, rich tools, offline support; negatives: lack of identity, search, lots of repeat information, lack of easy archivability (or discovery of the archive).

Community Server has a great forums solution, but I’m also now happy to announce our NNTP server. Yes, you can now connect to news://communityserver.org with Outlook Express. You can browse anonymously or you can login with the same credentials used at www.communityserver.org. Go ahead, give it a try…

We’re still testing and fine tuning it before we do a public beta – and of course there is more we want to do, e.g. make galleries or blogs available, show special newsgroups listing only posts you’ve participated in, etc.

We haven’t fully decided how we intend to price this, but our goal is to have some kind of free version too – with limited capabilities.

Soon we’ll also do a public beta of our FTP server too, this allows you to manage your photo gallery via any FTP tool – no cumberson web interfaces for trying to bulk upload/download photos.

Oh yeah, we’re working on an email listserv system that integrates with Community Server too — imagine post to your favorite discussion topic via email/Outlook, read a reply through the web interface, and post your reply via NNTP. It’s all going to be possible!