Back in April, at the end of my first post on the topic of “open source .NET“, I’d written that the next post in the series would be about Community Server. Telligent released version 2.1 of their flagship product just last week.
I first found the product at the end of 2004, when it was still Community Server: Forums. My employer was bidding on a project to provide an online forum to one of our government clients. One option they were considering was to make a copy of a custom online forum they’d already done for another client and modify it to suit the new requirements. This option reminded me of two things I dislike most about custom development:
- “Cut-and-paste inheritance“
- Reinventing the wheel–badly
It didn’t take too many Google searches before I found Community Server: Forums and put it forward as an alternative. The next few paragraphs will discuss how I felt the product stacked up against “the four questions”.
1. Is open source the best choice for this application?
Because of how long online forums have been around, open source is a particularly good choice for this application. I came across a pretty large number of options for online forums when I was searching. That said, a number of them were written in languages like PHP or Perl for UNIX (which helps answer question 2).
2. What platform are your developers most skilled at building for?
As a Microsoft shop, trying to deliver a customized solution on a platform the developers weren’t familiar with was far too high a risk. This eliminated a significant number of the applications I’d seen.
3. Is the best open source application on the .NET platform?
In 2004, I would have said no. To me it seemed more likely that the best open source forum application would be on UNIX, simply because of longevity. But given what the developers we had were familiar with, and the alternative of cut-and-paste inheritance with a classic ASP solution, Community Server: Forums was the best for our purposes.
4. Is it our goal to re-sell an application we’ve extended?
Unlike our experience with IssueTracker, the objective of making money with modified versions of this application was clear from the very beginning.
There are two “barriers to entry” with Community Server that proved significant in our case:
- C#
- Documentation
While I had made a deliberate choice to learn C# instead of VB.NET back in 2001, the vast majority of the developers I had to work with had moved to VB.NET from VB. The lack of familiarity with C# syntax led to a number of suboptimal choices for customizing the look, feel, and functionality of a particular instance of Community Server. The relative lack of documentation (both in the source code and stand-alone) made it a challenging platform to extend. I suspect that some of this is by design, as Telligent still makes some portion of their income from custom implementations of Community Server.
On the plus side, Community Server is quite well-built. Its naming and architecture are consistent enough that it took me relatively little time to customize a version of it for my most recent project: pushingback.com. The site is customized in a way that would make it quite easy for us to upgrade the site from Community Server 2.0 to 2.1 if requested. If the companies that currently use it are any indication (Microsoft, Dell, MSNBC), it’s one of the bigger (if not the biggest) successes of open source on the .NET platform.
In my next post on this subject, I’ll discuss an issue that seems unique to open source on .NET–competing products from Microsoft.
The previous comment prompted me to look at the latest information for Community Server licensing. It looks like service provider licensing is the probably the way to go for companies that want to use Community Server to deliver solutions to customers.
I not sure what rules apply to earlier licenses (Aspen Systems bought the professional edition of Community Server early enough to be grandfathered into the upgrade to version 2.0).