Łukasz Olbromski

In this post I would like to share my experiences with the new communitar I found few days ago - next application I found with help of friend of mine Chris Koenig - called just Digsby. What this communicator is so special? I would like to explain this in next few lines of my post. However, at the begging let me back few years back and introduce some problems I had with my previous communicators.

Gadu Gadu

It is really simple application, but one serious bug I am ecountering is conctact list synchronization. I am using constantly 3 machines and I can't keep it updated. Probably I am doing something wrong, but in this case this task is to complicated to me and I bored asking each person I am chating with who you are.

MSN Messenger (Live Messenger) 

I love this communicator and I haven't found any lacks of functionality I need. The only problem is that my friends are not using it.

Skype

I really love this communicator, has got all functionality I need:

• simple chat window with a lot of way to modify it and nice set of emoticons,
• stores contacts on the server side, so my contacts list is all the time up to date,
• enables voice conferences and calling to phones. Works pretty nice,
• enable to make video conference with quality I need,

However, since few weeks I and my friends start ecounder serious problem with messages delivering. Please imagine such scenarios:

1. I am online and my friend is not. When I send message that it will be delivered when we are both on-line.
2. I am visible and my friend is not. Very often he is not able to deliver message to me
3. When I have skype turn on on more than one machine, chat messages will be delivered to all skype instances

These problems makes my annoyed and I started looking for other communicator.

Accidentially I have found Digsby. That was so funny, beacuse I was reading blog of Chris Koenig (I love his post about communities) and I saw nice chat window on his blog web site. I decide to take a look and this is how I really like this communicator.

Digsby

This application has three cool features I like:

1. Enables integration with GMail - I love GMail and I cannot live without it.
2. Integration with other communicators.
3. Integration with email accounts.
4. Maintaining the state on a server.

Let me describe specific items in more details.

GMail integration 

Whenever I received an email I am notified about it with nice window. Moreover, I am able to open thread with new message read it and close. All the time application is running in background and you can see the number of not readed messages - nice icon in tracebar is visible. What I like the most when you click this icon the threads preview appears and you can do some nice things: make the thread as readed, open, report as spam, delete or archive. This is really quick and useful.

Integration with other communicators

Digsby offers integration with a lot popular communicators like: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber. The good thing is that all contacts and groups will remain and you can group a contacts in a diiferent way. This makes Digsby really powerfull communicator and you use your existing accounts.

Integration with email accounts

You can add almost any email account to Digsby and be notified about new emails. You can add following types of email account: GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, POP, IMAP, AOL/AIM Mail.

Maintaining the state on a server

The last good point is that Digsby is keeping your settings on a server. This makes you to create a Digsby account. Last thing I would like to mentioned is that when you would like to reset your Digsby password for security reasons yiu have to type all configured communicators passwords to have password reset.

That's all I would like to say about my brand new tool. If you have some thougths or you know other nice apps please let me know.

 

Cross Posted from Yet another geek's blog

posted @ Tuesday, April 08, 2008 6:28 PM | Feedback (0) |

Today I found an interesting community portal - Last.fm. This portal is used to share and extend your music preferences. You are able to listen to specific radio stations, try songs artists all over the world, read many interesting informations about artists, albums, songs and so on. I was totaly supriesed how many songs are there. Moreover, you can buy or download music you would like to have. Interesting thing is that this portal is collecting information about your music prefferences and is able to provide to you recommendations. This way you are able to find nice stuff without doing anything ;).  Last but not least you can download windows application which is integrated with this portal and listen to music you like to while working :).

I am really excited about this portal. Now I am able to listed to music and on the same time read something interesting or buy an album I like. Enjoy.

Cross Posted from Yet another geek's blog

posted @ Tuesday, April 01, 2008 12:10 AM | Feedback (0) |

I am very proud to announce that we have Heroes {Community} Launch in Wrocław event web site up and running. Althougth we have some work to do, but since tofday on this web site you will be able to find all information about the event like: schedule, registration (how it works, when starts), speakers bios and sessions descriptions.

The organization of this event was kicked, beacuse we joined other groups and organizations: Krakow .NET User Group, Academic Groups in Krakow and Wroclaw (Grupa .NET EKA, Grupa .NET UWr.) and societies: AVEC and Coworking Kraków. Currently we have over 20 poeple enaged in organization of this event and each day we have some news to share with interested poeple like: new speaker, sponsor and other information. I am sure that this event will be a great success, so please stay tuned and visit our web sites.

Finnaly, I would to congratulate to HCL team for fantastic work. Well done. 

Cross Posted from Yet another geek's blog

posted @ Sunday, March 30, 2008 11:12 PM | Feedback (0) |

Introduction

In this post I would like to share my experiences about creating and maintaining a web site for a Wroclaw .NET User Group and platforms that can use to create such web site. Hope that some of my thoughts will be useful for someone who is active member of any community group. I am a leader of Wroclaw .NET User Group since November last year. Since then Wroclaw .NET User Group grows quite quickly and we have more and more needs and expectations how our web site should look like. Currently our needs look like:

• Quick, efficient and easy to use registration mechanism.
• nformation about meetings and events.
• Information about our partners and friends.
• Forum.
• Blogs.
• Notification mechanism – about meetings, events, web site updates.
• Managing documents, tasks and other things related to managing group
• Place for adverts published by our partners like events, job opportunities.
• Group members also would like to put an advert about jobs they are looking for.
• Gallery to publish photos from our meetings, events etc.
• File storage to put materials (slides, code etc.) from our meetings.
• Calendar.
• Nice layout that group mates will like.
  

Simple start, simple solution - Groups Google
Let's go back few months to our beginnings. When you have to set up a group the most important thing is simple and efficient communication channel. I do not want to say that later is not needed, however at the beginning this is most important thing. This is a list of things we need as a group at the beginning:

• Simple registration mechanism.
• Information about meetings and events.
• Information about our partners and friends.
• Forums or other way of communication.
• Notification mechanism. 

Analyzing our capabilities nothing was simpler and faster than creating a group on Groups Google. Next task was adding friends to it and we were able to start work. This solution works well for month, however after this time was not enough for us. I don't want to judge this solution that is bad or not. I would like to highlight the lacks of functionality of Groups Google which were and still are important for us:

• Registration mechanism was not proper. We use a simple web page that our group members were editing and put her or his name. Unfortunately quite often we lost one or two names before of editing problems.
• Permissions management was not good as we need. Groups Google hasn't advanced permissions mechanism. User can be member of a group or not, and only members can have access to group or anyone. That's all. We not more things, like private forums for given group of users.
• The design of web you can do in this area with Groups Google. Site on Groups Google wasn't t that what we need. After month of our work we were unable to create a layout of our web site.
• We have a lot of problems with managing content: disappearing pages, problems with editing or adding logos on main web page etc.

However, Groups Google was very easy to use as a discussion forum. It was quick, easy to personalize. However, many people weren’t able to subscribe to specific kind of content like: forum, blogs, events, meetings, because of that they were receiving a lot of mails and don’t read them.

More needs, new solution - Community Server 

After a month spent on Groups Google I was looking for another platform that we can use. I spoke with Michal Jagiela - a leader of a Slaska Regionalna Grupa Microsoft - about different solutions that can be used a community platform. He offers a Community Server Professional Edition for Wroclaw .NET User Group with a lot of interesting features like:

• Full community platform with CMS.
• Themes support. Now we can create a theme for our web site and user can choose one.
• Blogs.
• Gallery.
• Place where we can put files to further downloading.
• Mail Gateway. This enables user to use NNTP in our forums.

Moreover, Michal offers a hosting for our web site as well. On one of our meeting we make long discussion that we would like to move on Community Server. Nobody had doubt about this decision. Few weeks later we have a new web site. Community Server give us all stuff we need, but a lot of work have to be done, before we customize Community Server to our needs. We needed to add following things to Community Server we received:

• Registration module. As a temporary solution we are using mail registration. It is simple and works.
• Events module containing information about event we are organizing, take part or just attend. We decide to create a blog with information about events we organizing or taking part.
• Meeting module. Here we would like to publish invitations and reports. We decide to use a blog for this purpose.
• Calendar. We find a control for Community Server and we are using it. Works pretty nice.

Looking forward - SiteFinity 3.2, Community Server 2008 or ITCore

Currently we had new opportunities and we would like to make a step forward and we have new needs. The most important things we need are:

• Multilanguage support for all content we are creating.
• Possibility to create our own controls.
• Creating polls, gathering responses and presenting results.
• Managing a group: managing and assigning tasks to the group mates, publishing a lot of documents related to the events we are organizing.

Now we are in very comfortable situation and we can choose one of the following solutions: SiteFinity CMS created by Telerik - our partner – ITCore project that should be released soon, the last but not least is a new version of a Community Server which also should be released soon by Telligent. I would like to describe all this solutions and my point of view of possible benefits of using one of them.

SiteFinity

SiteFinity is fantastic CMS and community platform and few days ago was released a new version 3.2 with offers nice features that are important for User Group point of view. 

•  Full featured version preferred by design studios, web development.
• Advanced CMS capabilities - versioning, permissions, multilingual support, etc.
• Extensible architecture, fully-exposed API.
• Integration of ASP.NET controls and Custom modules.
• Unlimited layout freedom to create.
• Website templates, using various.
• Completely customizable through.
• Visual Studio .NET.
• Support for multiple databases.
• Support for multiple membership services.
• Telerik RadControls UI suite.
• Word-identical content editing environment.
• Various ready-to-use modules (Blogs, Forms, News, Polls, etc).
• Drag-and-Drop Page Editing.
• Advanced highly customizable.
• Search service.
• Search engine optimization capabilities.
• Interactive online demonstration site.
• Ready-to-use website templates.

Other very important thing is that Telerik is working on templates that will fit User Groups needs and special features for SiteFinity that should make web site better. A lot of user group members know SiteFinity, because we are realizing two projects using this CMS.

ITCore

ITCore project has a long story and a lot of bad things have been said. I was taking part in this project – version 1 – and at the beginning of version 2, however because of moving to Denmark I was unable to continue my work on this project. I don’t want to write about version 1 of this project. Why? The answer is simple this is not topic of this post. But, I had a great time, gain a lot of experience and learn a lot. Now Artur Zarski is responsible for this project and I am sure that after some time people like it. As far as I know on ITCore project each group will receive Site which group will be able to customize and storage quota equal 10GB with option to extend. Here is a list of functionality we need:

• Documents libraries for storing documents we are creating
• Discussion forum with simple functionality. The forum is one of worst comparing to SiteFinity and Community Server.
• Polls. In MOSS creating a new polls is very simple, few mouse clicks and done. Gathering data and presenting results is also very nice.
• Creating new pages is also very simple and templates can be used here.
• Calendar.
• Place for files and movies.
• Blogs. I am not sure how blogs will be look in ITCore, however the standard one are not so nice.
• Wiki pages.
• Powerful search service.

The other good things related to ITCore project are that we don’t have to care about hosting, backups and other related stuff, Microsoft will be promoting this portal, more users will be able to find our web site, materials and blogs, and last but not least I am a member of Editors group.

Community Server 2008

Community Server in a new version 2008 will be released soon, however I cannot say a lot about this version. I know CS 2007 functionality well and it is almost perfect. However we need following things:

• Simple CMS and creating pages functionality and more flexible way to creating new controls and boxes that we would like to use like: latest polls, most popular threads, most popular blogs and so on.
• Multilanguage features.
• Polls module.
• News module.

I am not sure that next release of Community Server will have all this stuff we need, but I would like. The other thing that Community Server lacks is very difficult way of extending, and creating layouts, or making other modifications. When I found a post on Community Server blog I was happy, because of new functionality that will come with new release.
Below is a brief list of what you’ll find in this Beta (list came from Community server blog):

• Groups. We’ve added support for private and public groups that support their own membership, blog, forum, gallery, and pages. You can now easily create mini-communities for friends or for your team.
• Web Services APIs. Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services layer for working with Community Server. This makes it even easier to share data from within Community Server with other applications or tools. The Web Services implementation is a RESTful implementation and we also include a client library to include within applications that need to talk to Community Server.
• Friends. We’ve completely overhauled the friends functionality to make it easier to both manage and add friends. You’ll find the friends behavior much more like FaceBook’s friend functionality.
• Media Gallery. We’ve merged the Photo/File Galleries into a single Media Gallery application. The Media Gallery includes viewers for rendering images, audio, video making it even easier to share content in your community.
• Message Streams. New to Community Server is a message stream application that enables multi-user conversations (formerly private messages), social streams (similar to FaceBook), profile comments, and more.
• Enterprise File Storage. We’ve completely overhauled file storage so all files are in a Centralized File Store (includes both a File System and Amazon S3 provider).
• Widgets. Community Server now supports shareable widgets in all sidebars.
• Simplified Permissions. We’ve tried to simplify the rich permissions functionality that Community Server has always been known for. All the previous permissions capabilities still exist, but we’ve added some tools to make it even easier to manage and apply permissions.
• User Experience. We’ve started to introduce some new user experiences in both the Control Panel and other aspects of the site. When Community Server 2008 ships you’ll find a much friendly and beautiful experience for both running and managing your community.

Conclusions
As Brooks said 'no silver bullet - refired' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet) so we have to make a hard choice when we decide current platform. Each solution has pros and cons. However, we should decide soon which solution will be the best one. If you have any thoughts about presented solutions and its usages as community platform please drop a comment here I am sure that your ideas help us to make a decision. 
Cross Posted from Yet another geek's blog

posted @ Sunday, March 30, 2008 7:08 PM | Feedback (0) |