Keyvan Nayyeri

Exploring the past has become one of my main interests recently. In the past 2-3 months I’ve been navigating among older sites and blogs to read what I had read some years ago. I may be insane but I open older Persian blogs to remember what was out there 6-7 years ago and what has happened to all those people. I don’t know why I’m doing this but maybe I love the past better than the present, so enjoy recalling it! I think that grass was greener (!) in the past and it looks to have a sweeter taste for me.

However, I think that I’m not alone on this matter because someone else has done something similar! Older community members know Alex Lowe very well as one of the first ASP.NET community leaders who left Microsoft to join Telligent and other super-stars on Community Server product line, but he had a temporary suspension and has returned back to the company since the last year. Alex has also started a new blog with Graffiti that is worth reading.

Today he posted about his latest article on Community Server wiki which documents the past history of Community Server with almost all the major and minor builds with the build number, release date, and a reference to the original announcement. Besides, he has put things together with a brief story of what has happened to Community Server to come to existence, and continue its life to the current point, and what’s going to be done with the product in the future. It’s definitely an interesting post to read for everyone who has involved in Community Server lifecycle.

Many of the new developers may not know that Community Server was originally an integration of three popular Open Source projects that were actually the first in the field of ASP.NET: .Text blog engine, ASP.NET Forums, and ASP.NET Gallery.

Earlier versions were ugly in presentation layer and the main focus was on the integration and providing a constant membership along with tweaks for scaling up to a commercial product. Those versions had also very open licenses that could attract many users for single user usage or building small or medium scale communities.

Since version 2.0 Community Server could become mature and new professional features were added to the product. I think that this was the turning point in the lifecycle of Community Server because many users installed the product. This great progress continued in version 2.1 with excellent enhancements and put it on a very stable stage with almost all the modern features required for such a platform. This was also the point when a few books were published about the product including our Professional Community Server title. Telligent also started its MVP program and I’ve had the pleasure to be honored with this award. In this while community contributions were at their highest point and there was such a huge noise around the product.

But since version 2007 Telligent leadership had to make some serious decisions to keep the balance between openness and business. From this point they put more restrictions on the product with some limitations to enforce more users to buy commercial licenses. By the way, I had a post about this transition where I discussed it in good details. Moreover, version 2008 hastened the progress by increasing the license prices. While Community Server has been missing community contributions and non-profit users to some extent, it also has gained such a great success in finding a business community that not only has allowed Telligent to target enterprise scenarios for the future of this product but also has opened doors for smaller companies to act around this product and make money.

As I wrote in August 2008, that active community around the product is almost abandoned and product line is rebuilt to meet enterprise scenarios and professional business needs. Although that community had such a huge impact on the success of this platform and let many people like myself to find new friends and connect to new people, there is no doubt that Telligent had the right transition to improve its business. It’s a matter of a fact that we often need to make decisions that end up with choosing between those things that we love. Unfortunately it’s the nature of the world that we cannot have everything forever. I still can remember the day before Telligent leaders have a meeting to finalize their pricing model for Community Server 2007. Rob contacted me (and maybe some other guys) asking about my thoughts on the new pricing because an earlier draft had led to many controversy reactions by the community. I wondered why he’s working over the weekend, but he was clearly serious to find the best way to satisfy the community and keep the company in progress. I think that it was the first major step in the transition to the new model, but time has proven that Telligent leadership made the wise decision because their huge success in business during the last year shines as an evidence.

All in all, I’m not that active around the Community Server anymore (like almost all the fellow MVPs and developers), but I’m usually asked by friends and others to assist them on their problems with this platform. Fortunately Graffiti was a clever tool to fill the gap after the new licensing model for Community Server and many of those guys are still connected together on Graffiti community. This year would have important news about the new scale of Community Server and Evolution for enterprise and internal solutions which put it in a new era of its existence.

Now you know that if I had not come to the world of mathematics and computer, I could be a good historian!