Keyvan Nayyeri

Yesterday Rob Howard announced the new Telligent Customer Support strategy for 2008 with some major changes to the previous one.

He has outlined several important points that played a role in their decision and has given some nice statistics about their previous custom support service.  These points are those that we heard during the last couple of years from many Telligent customers.

Last year before announcing the Community Server 2007 licensing, I saw how much Rob was scrupulous about the licensing and wanted to choose the best way to tune the business side and community side.  Telligent has been a company that is built on a single product (this was to now, things should be different after this) and that product is Community Server.

Growing such a company with more employees, services, offices and ... isn't so easy when your product wants to answer to community members.  Community users expect it to be open with unlimited features for everyone while company wants to get more customers.  The point between these two is hard to find for everyone and Telligent leadership had to (and still has to) find that.

From my view the last year (2007) was the worst year for Community Server community from the community activity point of view (unlike 2006 that was a great year) and I have some reasons for this:

• New licensing method wasn't attractive enough to get more users and was more restrictive though and some of the existing users left this product and migrated to some alternative options so there were less users to work on the community.  Most of migrated users were those who were using free version and had a good effect on the community.  Most of the remained users were customers that just wanted to use the product.
• Older community members didn't keep up their activities like the past including MVPs and other community members.  I wasn't an exception, myself.  Military service and lack of time didn't let me to keep my activity on the community.  One of several reasons that I have in mind is Telligent changed its strategy to put many features in the product and put a good power on forums to answer to customers and as a result there wasn't enough free space for community activities.  I experienced this several times when took a look at forums and saw that each thread is taken by a Telligent employee.  I can't say this is bad because that's great to see such a customer support by a company but it can get the space from community members though.
• We didn't have community projects and new releases like 2006.  This has a correlation with the previous item and probably comes from the fact that many requests for extensions had been answered by Telligent as a part of the product.  On the other hand, Chameleon was extendable enough to be able to to provide alternatives for extensions.
• Telligent improved Community Server a lot.  They tried to make it simpler and easier to use and install and hired new developers to improve the performance.  This had a huge effect on reducing the issues hence forum threads.  You agree that these issues were good points to start community activities by answering to them.
• There were less community advertisements and praises for the product from normal community members.  Previously there were several guys who were using Community Server as a single-user blog and gallery with free licenses and were providing advertisement for the product but in 2007 with new licensing guide, restrictions and prices, they migrated from Community Server.  Some of them were well-known .NET community members.  On the other side, birth of BlogEngine and excellent growth of Subtext got many new users from Community Server who just wanted a simple and light application.

Regarding these point, I think 2007 wasn't a very active year for Community Server community but was the best year for the product from the quality point of view.  One after one, each new version became better and customers were happy with it.

It's obvious that Telligent leadership has moved more focus on business side of the product and their decisions prove this and of course, it was predictable from the past.  We all know that Telligent needs money and their employees have to put the food on the table!!  New strategy, although seems restrictive for community and community activities, but can let Telligent to achieve business goals better and easier.

But Rob, Jason and other other Telligent leaders were clever enough to keep themselves on the community by announcing forthcoming Graffiti CMS.  In my opinion new customer support service in conjunction with availability of the Graffiti CMS in the first quarter of 2008 with Community Server 2008 can bring the activity back to the community.  Graffiti is simpler and lighter than Community Server so is easier to discover.  It's also new and everything new can provide many ideas to work.  Now that Telligent has decided to make Community Server a real enterprise web platform, Graffiti is going to be an alternative for single users and small sites to use it as something that they expected to see in Community Server for 2-3 years!  Community Server is big and slow to update with new technologies but most likely Graffiti doesn't have this negative point.

All in all, I wish a better year for Telligent's community for Community Server and Graffiti in 2008.  And I also wish that I can spend more time on this community over the next year.  My military service ends in the next October and reaching to latest months, I may have more free time to spend on my interests.

The last point that I'd like to mention is that you can speak with Rob and Jason and give them your feedbacks easily and be sure they listen and regard them in their management.