Telligent Systems’ Community Server is a full-featured forum system that has blossomed into a content management system (CMS). It includes a gallery, file management, blogs and a portal system, all running on .NET.
Having move my own sites to PHP over a year ago, I haven’t had a need to really check out Community Server thoroughly. Until now. I’m helping setup a forum in a Microsoft environment, and it offered the perfect opportunity to give Community Server a try.
Having cut my teeth on Snitz Forums running ASP, and used both phpBB and Invision Power Board before settling on vBulletin, I’ve had experience with a number of forum systems. How does Community Server compare? Let’s just say, I’m impressed.
Community Server provides excellent integration of blogs, image gallery and file library functions — three of the most popular components of an online community. The portal features inline editing akin to Google Page Creator. The UI for both users and administrators is the best I’ve seen, although a bit slow on a shared server. But what really impressed me is the presentation. Blogs are presented with Digg-like comment and read stats; the portal features cotent in well-designed, Web 2.0-ish rounded-corner-modules; and everything has a clean, polished look about it.
Best of all, they have an excellent interpretation of folksonomy-styled tagging, including a tag cloud.
Of course, there is a downside. First, you’ll need to be running on a Microsoft IIS web server with .NET 1.1 or 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server. Generally speaking, monthly web hosting costs for this setup are slightly more expensive than the typical LAMP solution. But if you’re running on a Windows server platform, or comfortable programming in .NET, you should definitely check it out.
Oh, and a note to the vBulletin developers, definitely check out Community Server’s tagging, blogging, and stream-lined administrative interface. Please?
technorati tags:community, forums, Community_Server, .NET, vBulletin, IPB, phpBB, Snitz, Telligent
I came across this post doing a google search for “community server review” to see if others have had a similar experience to mine. Catch more flies with honey I guess.
My thought on Community Server….Steer clear if you need support.
I saw the enormous amount of users and number of threads in their developer community and immediately assumed that the developer community is very active and helpful. This has turned out to be quite the contrary and if you do further research you will quickly see that there are many many many unanswered threads on their site. Including some posted by users with serious concerns regarding SQL Injection attacks that are completely unanswered from as far back as 2006-07. I would say of the 15 or so posts I have made to their forums about 75% have gone unanswered some over a year old.
In addition we have a support contract and have found their reps to be quite short in their responses and not overly helpful and have turned to solving many issues on our own. In fact of the 3 or 4 questions we’ve posed to them I can’t think of one that they actually fixed the issue.
I am not from a competing company and our site is now so ingrained in Community Server we would have to do a complete restructure to get out of it so we will continue to purchase updates and new versions. If I were someone in a purchase decision role, and I am to an extent, I would do some serious due diligence before I picked Community Server. I often feel as though we could have gotten a better deal going the open source route.
Sean, your points seem to indicate that Community Server is perhaps better suited if you are willing and able to roll up your sleeves and get into the code. If you’re looking for a turn-key system, maybe it’s not for you.
That’s not to say that CS is bad, just that (based on your experience) won’t get good support when you have questions or problems.
From the developer’s standpoint, support is one of the more difficult things. It can be expensive. Customers have varying degrees of skill and experience. And an inordinate amount of support is spent helping people with the basics: how to install and configure the software; setup a database; etc.
I’m not saying that was your case — you didn’t provide any specifics. Just that maybe that’s Community Server’s problem.
I’ve used a couple of different content management systems (CMS) — not counting WordPress, which I don’t really consider a true CMS — and found some are more “friendly” to programmers and others friendly to designers. A great example is Drupal. A wonderful, powerful system, but you should be proficient in PHP to really make the most of it. In contrast, Joomla is perhaps less powerful, but easier for a non-programmer to use.
It’s been a while since I’ve tackled a project with Community Server, but I had found it to be a pretty slick system with a lot to offer. There are some large scale sites using it, so it can scale.
I’m sort of curious to learn more about your experience. Shoot me an email if you’re willing to fill in some of the details.
Sean, your points seem to indicate that Community Server is perhaps better suited if you are willing and able to roll up your sleeves and get into the code. If you’re looking for a turn-key system, maybe it’s not for you.
That’s not to say that CS is bad, just that (based on your experience) won’t get good support when you have questions or problems.
From the developer’s standpoint, support is one of the more difficult things. It can be expensive. Customers have varying degrees of skill and experience. And an inordinate amount of support is spent helping people with the basics: how to install and configure the software; setup a database; etc.
I’m not saying that was your case — you didn’t provide any specifics. Just that maybe that’s Community Server’s problem.
I’ve used a couple of different content management systems (CMS) — not counting WordPress, which I don’t really consider a true CMS — and found some are more “friendly” to programmers and others friendly to designers. A great example is Drupal. A wonderful, powerful system, but you should be proficient in PHP to really make the most of it. In contrast, Joomla is perhaps less powerful, but easier for a non-programmer to use.
It’s been a while since I’ve tackled a project with Community Server, but I had found it to be a pretty slick system with a lot to offer. There are some large scale sites using it, so it can scale.
I’m sort of curious to learn more about your experience. Shoot me an email if you’re willing to fill in some of the details.
Don’t misunderstand me. CS does have a lot to offer and really the product is put together quite well and once you get the hang of it its really fairly simple to work with. I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves but I figure if I’m paying $2000 for something I should only have to roll my sleeves half way not completely disrobe and put on a greco roman outfit to get what I want 🙂 ….my point was if you’re someone who like me figures a thousand other people must have asked this question before and probably know the solution and would prefer just ask than wait a day or two to wrestle with it on your own don’t expect to go the CS forums or support and get what you’re looking for….and while I’m pissing and moaning I know forum etiquette says search first but frankly I gave up on theirs and think they should consider likewise. I just never get what I expect from it. On our own site I replaced it with the more reliable google site search.
As an example try this go to the communityserver.com web site click community then click forums then in the little search box type “siteurls_override.config” this is their way of building urls/url rewriting and I understand a large component of the navigational functionality and that search returns “Sorry, we were unable to find any results using your search terms. Please change your search terms and try again.” You would think and I know for a fact having used their site that there are at least 100+ posts related to this file.
Now if you change it to “siteurls override config” you get 147 results the first of which is about meta tag robots and doesn’t even mention “siteurls_override.config” clicking through to page 4 of 15 or so and the thing just returns “Not Found: Resource Not Found”. Heck just going to google.com and searching for “siteurls_override.config” produces better results of the community server web site.
I’m a developer and know what it feels like for someone to sit and criticize and its a lot easier to criticize than compliment and like I said there are a ton of great features in community sever but these nuisances can tend to overpower the benefits when you’re trying to solve a problem in as short a time as possible and its very easy to get irritated when you have a deadline to meet.
I can tell you for a fact if I’m using open source its alot easier to say ‘get what you pay for’ ….. when you spend roughly $2000 and don’t feel like you’re getting what you paid for …..very irritating.
Don’t misunderstand me. CS does have a lot to offer and really the product is put together quite well and once you get the hang of it its really fairly simple to work with. I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves but I figure if I’m paying $2000 for something I should only have to roll my sleeves half way not completely disrobe and put on a greco roman outfit to get what I want 🙂 ….my point was if you’re someone who like me figures a thousand other people must have asked this question before and probably know the solution and would prefer just ask than wait a day or two to wrestle with it on your own don’t expect to go the CS forums or support and get what you’re looking for….and while I’m pissing and moaning I know forum etiquette says search first but frankly I gave up on theirs and think they should consider likewise. I just never get what I expect from it. On our own site I replaced it with the more reliable google site search.
As an example try this go to the communityserver.com web site click community then click forums then in the little search box type “siteurls_override.config” this is their way of building urls/url rewriting and I understand a large component of the navigational functionality and that search returns “Sorry, we were unable to find any results using your search terms. Please change your search terms and try again.” You would think and I know for a fact having used their site that there are at least 100+ posts related to this file.
Now if you change it to “siteurls override config” you get 147 results the first of which is about meta tag robots and doesn’t even mention “siteurls_override.config” clicking through to page 4 of 15 or so and the thing just returns “Not Found: Resource Not Found”. Heck just going to google.com and searching for “siteurls_override.config” produces better results of the community server web site.
I’m a developer and know what it feels like for someone to sit and criticize and its a lot easier to criticize than compliment and like I said there are a ton of great features in community sever but these nuisances can tend to overpower the benefits when you’re trying to solve a problem in as short a time as possible and its very easy to get irritated when you have a deadline to meet.
I can tell you for a fact if I’m using open source its alot easier to say ‘get what you pay for’ ….. when you spend roughly $2000 and don’t feel like you’re getting what you paid for …..very irritating.
Community Server will work great for you – if you don’t hardly use it. If you expect to actually be able to USE the advertised functionality including the single sign-on or reassigning postings from one user to another when deleting users, you will be SORELY disappointed. As a free trial, it may be fun to toy around with, but if you pay $20,000 or $40,000 or $60,000 for ONE YEAR of the licensed version to use the SSO and other advanced features, you will want to beat your own head in for making such a stupid and COSTLY mistake. And when you try to get the tech support that you also paid for, you will find that to be sorely lacking as well.
DON’T WRITE THAT CHECK!!! Save your money and choose a free alternative. The “extra features” that you thought were worth paying for DO NOT WORK. Don’t be suckered in like my organization was.
Community Server will work great for you – if you don’t hardly use it. If you expect to actually be able to USE the advertised functionality including the single sign-on or reassigning postings from one user to another when deleting users, you will be SORELY disappointed. As a free trial, it may be fun to toy around with, but if you pay $20,000 or $40,000 or $60,000 for ONE YEAR of the licensed version to use the SSO and other advanced features, you will want to beat your own head in for making such a stupid and COSTLY mistake. And when you try to get the tech support that you also paid for, you will find that to be sorely lacking as well.
DON’T WRITE THAT CHECK!!! Save your money and choose a free alternative. The “extra features” that you thought were worth paying for DO NOT WORK. Don’t be suckered in like my organization was.