CS2008: Good news for .NET Community Program sites
Last night I sent Rob Howard an email about some concerns that I had with Community Server, one of them being the .NET Community Program. As for this concern, here is his response:
"The “.NET Community Program” absolutely still exists. I’m sorry, we need to do a better job of making sure people know about this."
A few email exchanges later, I received the CS 2008 .NET Community Program license for this site. Which means that we will be switching over to CS 2008 very shortly, after I write a CFS module to store objects in the database. This is also good for those concerned about the Calendar module as it will make it much easier for me to work on it.
Rob said a few other things that made me a lot more comfortable with where Telligent is taking their Community Server and Graffiti CMS products. Graffiti CMS is targetted for small to mid-sized companies, but it currently isn't ready for this customer base and it was a mistake to release CS 2008 as niether product is ready for release. Telligent's investment in Graffiti CMS is starting to increase and the first realization of this increase will include forums and wikis. Once the forums and wikis are available, this customer base will be able to easily move away from Community Server. Also, Telligent has recently slashed the price of Graffiti CMS from $399 to $99.
He also said, "I can’t provide a lot of details right now, but we’re going to announce some significant business news in the coming weeks that will hopefully make all these pieces fit together for you." One of the most import things that will be coming up is a true roadmap the includes what they are currently working on, and where they plan to be. This is something that they completely dropped about a year ago, and he agreed that they need to publish a roadmap and keep it up to date.