Version 5 feature review

Telligent have rebranded their products:

• Telligent Community (was Community Server)
• Telligent Enterprise (was Evolution)
• Telligent Analytics (was Harvest)
• Telligent Evolution Platform (under pins both Community and Enterprise)

Some of the key issues for discussion:

• Enterprise Search has replaced .NET based Lucene with Java based Solr, an open-source Enterprise Search solution. You now need to install Java and Tomcat.
• Documention so far so good, the documentation especially for Telligent Community looks good.
• SDK currently not available but Telligent are saying the Platform allows for much better customisation without need to use the SDK.
• Widgets loads as been done to create customizeable (using the z on purpose) widgets that users can move around the page.
• Themes brand new Fiji theme, bad news is Hawaii isn’t supported so upgrading themes might be an issue.
• Groups & Categories good news here, Telligent have introduced unlimited group/sub-group hierarchy, and groups can now have multiple blogs/forums/wikis and finally there is Group messaging.
• Profiles more good news with admin controlled user profile fields.
• Wiki there looks to be new Wiki functionality, need to read more.

Anyone else got a view?

Can you further explain or provide a link regarding "Telligent are saying the Platform allows for much better customisation without need to use the SDK"? We were starting a custom project with CS Evolution and I'm particularly interested in this topic.

CS 2008.5 is now Community and Evolution became Enterprise. What do you mean by "Telligent Evolution Platform"?

I really enjoyed the micro-blogging features. I think there is some new features on the wikis regarding editing conflicts but need to further investigate it.

Hi All -  Our team just finished some 20 minute product overview videos yesterday that I hope we'll get posted very shortly to augment the docs.  

When it comes to Telligent Evolution Platform... just consider that the as yet unreleased SDK that both of the primary products (Enterprise & Community) are built with.  

Thanks for the info Josh.

Developing on top of CS is not a straightforward process- at least with old SDK. I think that one of the major show stoppers was the lack of documentation.

With so many features you guys must be overwhelmed but I can't avoid to suggest the creation of a start up guide (and ideally a small video) regarding the new Evolution Platform - specifically regarding custom applications development.

Java?!?!? Why in the world would I want to install two platform runtimes on my server? I would like more information on why that choice was made, and why, if there wasn't a decent .NET version, they didn't roll their own, instead of building on a completely separate platform.

And regarding the SDK, part of the reason CS has the following that is does is that they have released the source code. Every year, more and more of the code gets dropped into "Telligent.*" obfuscated assemblies. If they don't ship an SDK, there will be less develpment on CS as an application platform.

When I saw Solr Search server I was amazed too!

Hopefully it will be easier to integrate custom developed applications with the search system. I say hopefully since it should be straightforward to include any new items into Solr but I still don't know how can we change the platform search engine since I remember reading something about it being obfuscated.

Our goal, is to deliver a great user experience.  For a vast majority of our users the platform/tools are secondary.

We considered supporting a secondary search provider written in .NET, but when we asked ourselves, "who would want to use this other provider" the answer was always no one. Why would you want a version of search that couldn't find results?

You do not have to write any code in Java to use Solr, it is highly extensible with tons of add-ons, and makes search orders of magnitude better. (Did you notice you can search for people, groups, etc?).

Search is an integral part of Evolution. We could not afford to compromise, even if that meant requiring a some additional installation steps (NOTE: IMO, the new search is far easier to setup and maintain than the previous Enterprise Search).

Thanks,

Scott

I'm sorry, but using a Java component in a .NET environment is a bad decision.  A lot of customers select your product because it's written in .NET.  You've just alienated all of them.  

99% .NET + 1% Java = 200% hack.

I must say I'm a little disappointed too, both because I don't think my shared hosting provider will want to install Java + Tomcat + Solr on their servers and because there is no more a free express version that I can use in my public site. It will be a challenge to move my site to Telligent Community 5.0 (which I published a couple weeks ago) with these constraints.

Still I love the product and will see what I can do to move to the new version.

Hi Julio,

While it is plausible to run Evolution on shared hosting, we definitely do not recommend it which is why we were comfortable with the end result.

Not sure on your budget, but maybe a VPS will work for you.

You are certainly entitled to your own opinion.

Solr is a service. While powered by Java, it is simply a web service which Evolution leverages.

Regardless of the technology, our challenge is to deliver the best user experience...even if this complicates things (slightly) for IT/developers.  

Search is still a provider and has a much cleaner/richer API that is geared towards extensibility (ie, you can index more than just posts). It can be easily replaced by another implementation.

If you can find something in the .NET world that is even half as good as Solr, please let me know at scottw@telligent.com.

Did things that were mentioned in a previous roadmap get included, like "ideas", "events" and "greater user profile customisation"?

I can't find the old roadmap on the site anymore

Ideas and events are not yet solutions we ship out of the box (although there are partner solutions in this area).

User profiles got a lot updates (browser management, easier editing, and they are now searchable).

HTH,

Scott

Thanks a lot Scott. I was kinda hoping that it would be easier to add fields to user profiles... can this be done in Control Panel?

You can add fields to user profiles.  In Control Panel, go to Memberhship Admin > User Profile Configuration.