On Friday November 2nd, Rob Howard (of
Telligent fame) made an
announcement about Community Server, which included the following summary:
1.
The Personal and Small Business licenses of Community Server will no longer be available. Instead we will direct those customers to our Software as a Service offering (hosted Community Server). Existing Personal and Small Business customers can continue to receive equivalent licenses of future versions of Community Server.
2.
The Software as a Service license (Hosted Edition) of Community Server will be $199/mo. We are dropping the price per-month by $100 and are looking to our SaaS offering as the path for small business customers that need a community (no setup and no configuration required).
3.
The free Express Edition's limits will be increased to 15 Blogs and 250 files in the File Galleries. If you are a company interested in using Community Server, the minimum you will pay is now $2,000. While I can understand Telligent wanting to shift their focus towards large cash cows like MySpace and Microsoft, but I can't help but feel a bit let down.
In the past 4 years, I have helped 2 different organizations implement at least 3 licensed sites using Community Server. I migrated my own blog from Blogger to Community Server over a year ago. I have written multiple
articles/tutorials relating to Community Server, one of which was published on
DotNetSlackers.
It appears I bet on the wrong horse. 4 years ago, I was evaluating whether I should focus on Community Server or DotNetNuke. Community Server just felt and looked better.
The work I do is for small businesses and non-profits. I hesitated recommending a solution that was nearly $500. At $2,000, I can see that I will need to find another offering.
In my mind, it seems that Telligent could have handled this better, from a PR standpoint. If they felt like Graffiti was going to be the solution that would fill in the gap, don't make an announcement like this until Graffiti is released. At $200/month for a managed/hosted solution, that is impractical for the customers who were just shafted by this announcement. I don't feel like Telligent gaves is small business customers any reasonable alternative. Now they just seem flaky.
I hope that the direction that Telligent is heading with Community Server serves them well. I will need to seriously consider whether or not to use Telligent's offerings in the future. They may decide to pull the plug on them, very abruptly.