Keyvan Nayyeri

After a long period of time, yesterday Dave Burke wrote a blog post about his perspectives about Community Server and the dead community around it! As you may know, Dave was a .NET developer and one of the early Community Server folks who joined Telligent as a community evangelist and left the company after some months to become a freelance Community Server developer as a specialist. Recently he switched to a wider area as a .NET freelancer and community builder. He even migrated his own blog from Community Server to BlogEngine.NET, regarding the fact that his blog has been running on Community Server and its father, .Text, for some years!

I know Dave from the first days that I began blogging on this site and joined to the Community Server community. Those days Dave, Jayson and I had a triangle of blogs about Community Server development and were doing very well to make things better. Dave has proved to be a very special man with unique opinions about everything. He’s also a very respectful person who receives enthusiasm from me for his opinions because I believed that he has very unbiased perspectives.

I’m going to write a follow up post to his blog post but before that I want to clarify that I don’t want to count on Telligent leadership for its business strategies. Sometimes business opposes to our personal preferences. I think that I also have proved to be a person with unbiased opinions about many things. Despite my field of work and development which is .NET, I’ve been complaining about many things inside Microsoft. I also have some negative opinions about the current position of Telligent that I’ll outline here.

I was one of the first active community members who contributed to the Community Server community from the early Beta days and had the opportunity to find great friends on this community. Even though I never took a business project around Community Server but I spent a lot of time on this enterprise platform. I never had any business with Community Server or Graffiti (as main Telligent products) but spent a lot of time and put a good effort to help their progress.

I always liked to see the success of Telligent and its products both because I’ve been a part of this progress and because I loved to see the success of my friends. Telligent is successful and there is no doubt about that. Its motivation from the community and open source to specialized professional business is a proof for this statement and the company’s growth pace is another proof!

But the bad point is that there is no community around Community Server anymore! Dave has written this and he’s exactly right! Back in November 2007 I wrote a post about Telligent Customer Support announcement and pointed that Telligent is moving from a single product to multiple products and from an active community to an active business. Fortunately (or unfortunately) this has happened and this transition is almost done!

Going back and forth and taking a look at Community Server and Graffiti forums, you will believe that there isn’t such a huge demand for contributions by users to these communities. I have some Community Server MVP friends who still have their business with Telligent products but can’t find their active contributions to the community anymore!

In my opinion this big change on the community is a direct result of Telligent plans. They kept their focus on business and bold commercial goals and it smoothly threw them far from the community.

I personally wouldn’t be happy for this happening because I loved this community. But actually this is good for Telligent. We can’t blame them for what they have done because this was the true choice for the future of a company but the bad point is that Telligent is leaving something that was actually the fundamental of their growth. Being a supporter of the community and sharing the core source code of the platform as well as their good cooperation with communities could help Community Server to gain a huge demand. But now they leave this to build a better business future.

Unfortunately this is an aggravating fact about such business. I had read about this before but had doubt that this will happen to Telligent or not. Many of the companies with the same business strategy walked in the same paht and Telligent is of course walking on their footsteps.

However, this had to happen and it has happened whether we like it or not! I just can hope a better success for Telligent and wish that Rob, Jason and Scott (along their employees and partners) draw a great future of this lovely company that could be able to gather a group of ASP.NET stars. Telligent is growing fast abroad and this is a good sign for their future.

But for myself, this isn’t very sad. As Dave points out, I always try to stand on my principles and I’ve been a .NET developer rather than a Community Server developer and even a software fan rather than a .NET developer! I tried to use Community Server as a case study to improve my knowledge and didn’t want to make it my knowledge! I read many silly statements about myself as a Community Server developer by some guys who were considering me as a Community Server developer only, but I just laughed at them and booked those authors as silly people who don’t add anything to this world!

I smoothly proved that I’m not a Community Server developer, rather I’m someone who loves to build software not only with .NET but also with anything that can be used. Community Server has been a joy for me and a good evidence is that I never had any business with it! It would be predictable for you that I’ve had (and still have) many business opportunities around Community Server but I always stayed away from them!

Here the point is that you should always stand on your principles! Community Server and Community Servers come and go and only your principles remain for you. At last I’m able to build what I want and this is the point!

However, I still love Telligent and my friends there and try to help promote them as much as I can. For now I’m loving Graffiti to use it on my blog but may switch from it to something open source someday! I may even write my own engine. Sometimes I’m very rude and don’t like to apply any third party code as I didn’t for Waegis! So I’m surprised how I could run this blog on top of third party commercial engines for a long time!

But all in all, I’m enduring from the fact that community is going to die not only for Telligent but also for the whole Microsoft thing. I wrote that Microsoft community has hit the minimum level of activity in the past months and it’s still continuing to deteriorate. I see nothing new and interesting in my feeds from the .NET communities. Microsoft is finally paying the price of wrong plans and strategies for the community! Can they change this with a new release or announcement? Hopefully PDC 2008 can change many things!