Telligent News & Articles

Yesterday's theme of integrating social software and business data (via application integration) was echoed by Jive Software (news, site). They have announced a new agreement that will see SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence onDemand solutions integrated into Jive's Social Business Software suite.

It's a day for news on the Enterprise 2.0 front and Telligent (news, site) wants you to hear what they've been hard at work on. It's about that time of the year when Telligent offers up a new version of their community solutions. This time, instead of simply a new version number with some new functionality, we get major products upgrades and new branding to boot.

Say goodbye to Community Server, Community Server Evolution and Harvest Reporting Server. Say hello to Telligent Community 5.0, Telligent Enterprise 2.0 and Telligent Analytics 3.0.

Oh, and for those of you interested in Telligent Graffiti, we have a little update, but don't get too excited.

Interesting news in the pipeline for Telligent (news, site). Founder and CEO Rob Howard has released the reigns of the company he founded almost 5 years ago to Patrick Brandt.

Well, released the reigns -- sort of. Howard has been appointed the new CTO of Telligent. A position that he feels right at home in.

There is not an organization out there today who isn't implementing or planning some kind of enterprise social computing solution. There are a lot of things to consider when developing your strategy and just as many technological solutions out there to choose from.

Here we offer you 8 articles on social computing, some focused on the plan, some focused on the technical solution. Both will provide you plenty of information to focus on your plans.

When you start thinking about whether or not you need a community, there are likely a dozen questions running through your mind -- at least there should be. If you haven't taken the time to think about what a community will achieve for your organization, then don't go buying the technology to create one.

If you need a little guidance along your path, CMSWire talked with two community evangelists: Lawrence Liu, Director of Platform Strategy at Telligent (news, site) and George Dearing, Telligent Evangelist about how to tell if you need one, how to approach a community strategy and what are some key features in community solutions.

Whether you choose to go the path of Telligent Community Server or not, there's some solid information to take home and think about.

If you are looking for a community solution, then Telligent (news, site) is one of most well known. But it may not contain all the functionality out of the box that you would like -- we're speaking of content management here.

So it's good to have partners like Four Roads to come alongside and fill in the gaps in functionality. CMSWire took a look at the content management capabilities this company provides Community Server, known as CS Publisher.

When we published our review of Telligent's Graffiti Web Content Management System we were made a little uncomfortable when we caught wind from the community that more than a few people considered the product to be dead.

Following this up, we double checked with Telligent (news, site) CEO Rob Howard that this wasn't the case. And now Telligent has officially confirmed it on their own website -- the product will live on.

Previous to this update, the Graffiti Web CMS blog had not been updated since February, when Graffiti 1.2 was released. So there has been a bit of radio silence.

Houston, We Have Contact

Silence is golden, but not always. The community wanted some answers.

Now we see some activity in the form of a general update plus some details on future plans for the Graffiti CMS. We're happy to re-confirm here that Graffiti does indeed have a future.

The post states that Telligent was not prepared for the response it received to Graffiti -- especially since it was created to be a sort of "test bed" for ideas and concepts. That being said, the plan is to go forward with version 2.0, just not in the time frame originally stated.

Telligent goes on to say that they also weren't prepared for the effort to get the next version off the ground. The cutbacks in staff -- many of whom were on the Graffiti team -- did not help.

Graffiti Web CMS is not Telligent's primary offering, Community Server and Community Server Evolution are first and foremost with their Harvest Reporting Server safely in tow.

That's the story for now. If momentum continues to build around Graffiti, perhaps this will change. But the only current promise is that we will see v2.0 of Graffiti sometime this summer.

Editor's Note: About Graffiti (June 23, 2009)

Waiting for this one, weren't you? We asked Howard what was happening with Graffiti, their web content management system. We expected to see a new version or some kind of news coming out this month related to it's future development.

We now find we must wait a little while longer. Howard said that complete focus has been on the community and analytic solutions and not Graffiti. They have started some dialog as to what its future looks like (so he is indicating that it has a future, that's good), but he wouldn't go into details, saying it's too early to spill the beans of those conversations.

As the team ramps down from releases of Telligent Enterprise, Community and Analytics, focus will shift to Graffiti. Our only thoughts here are this: if web content management is your primary focus, Telligent does not appear to be your answer, because it is not theirs.

If Community solutions that engage enterprise integration and tight social and web analytics is your focus, then take a closer look.

Let's talk about social computing. Or we can talk about communities. Or we can talk about enterprise 2.0 and social networking, blogging, forums, wikis, what have you. Regardless of what you choose to call it, there's a need to analyze what is happening when you deploy or harness social tools. And, no, we are not talking about basic traffic stats. 

Telligent (news, site) has a keen awareness of this need. Hence we have Harvest Reporting Server -- social analytics for their social computing solutions, Community Server and Community Server Evolution. Interested in getting a better feel for what social analytics really are and how you can leverage them, we spent some time with Telligent. This is what we learned.

Telligent's primary offering is Community Server (news, site), a social media and community solution. But it's not the only thing they have going. They also offer a web content management system called Graffiti CMS.

Graffiti CMS is a simple web content management system -- the CMS in its name actually stands for "content made simple". Some consider it a blogging platform, but it contains features and functionality that you don't normally see in such as platform. And anyways, the lines between blogging platforms and web content management systems are rapidly blurring, n'est pas?

Our interest piqued, we took a look at Graffiti and here's what we found.

Jive has been in the communities/social software space for over eight years now, starting back when the spirit of reaching out and collaborating hadn't started to take hold. Today they claim they have the next big techology solution for the enterprise and they have staked their communities software name on it. Say goodbye to Clearspace and hello to the Social Business Software Application Suite - Jive SBS 3.0.

The global economy may be imploding, but the flow of investment capital into the social media space shows no sign of recession. Intel Capital continues the trend by taking a US$ 20 million stake in Telligent Systems.

Microsoft did it for SharePoint, Clickability did it for their CMPublish platform. Now it’s Telligent’s turn. Time to plan for a new conference. It’s called in.telligent 2008 and it’s happening in Dallas, Texas October 20-22, 2008. An opportunity to put your social media learning to use.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has kicked into full swing and Microsoft seems to plan on taking center stage. They have already laid out a number of new announcements that give it’s flagship content management system SharePoint an overflow of social networking options.