For the last four months, we have been a customer of our own product, using Telligent Community to launch the new telligent.com site. Our goals at the beginning of the project were to:

1. Create a dedicated support community in which we encourage self-help and collaboration among community members.
2. Introduce a group just for developers to discuss the extension of the Telligent Evolution platform.
3. Create a seamless transition between content and community with integrated collaboration opportunities throughout the site experience.
4. Significantly improve access to and quality of the documentation about our products.

From our perspective, we hit or exceeded each of these goals, but we're always open to feedback from you.

The most important lessons we learned during the use of our own product:

• The ability to drag-and-drop widgets to arrange the layout of pages is priceless. It let us arrange each page just as we'd like, including creating group defaults that apply to every existing and new sub-group under that group.
• CSS overrides at both the site and group levels are extremely useful to make small tweaks to layout or look and feel and still maintain consistency within a group.
• Creating new custom widgets that are extensions of existing widgets is simple and straightforward.
• Flexible permissions allow us to establish group-level permissions, as well as hide content within certain groups from everyone except those who are in specific roles (e.g., Telligent employees).
• Moderation tools, including community-driven abuse reporting, and built-in spam controls allow us to monitor and manage activity within the community. We know when inappropriate content is introduced to the community and can quickly deal with it.
• Wikis are a powerful tool to create product documentation, allowing internal expertise to be easily input and tracked.
• Telligent Analytics tells us who our community influencers are, who asks and answers the most questions, how quickly questions are initially responded to and then ultimately answered, what content is most popular (so we can create more of the same), who downloaded which product version, and so much more. We can easily deliver comprehensive reports to executive management to prove the power of our community.

Bottom line: Telligent Community is a powerful collaboration application. You can significantly lower your customer support costs, listen to conversations about your products and services, and engage your external audiences in dialogues to drive improvements and innovation.