Telligent, Inc. are making a smart move to promote the telligent brand over a generic “community” product/technology name. Gone is the communityserver.com website, this now redirecting to telligent.com. I think this fits well for their existing, growing & prestigious customer-base who are looking for a industrial-strength commerce friendly social networking architecture.

But … there is a catch.

Telligent is a commercial organization – fact - chasing high-value social networking business. Finding a sales and support model to simultaneously support the free-express-never-have-RTFM community and the large corporate with a community in millions is never an easy task. The home/hobby/trainee demands (unfairly) the same tender loving attention being paid-for by the large corporate. Worse for telligent is that any John Doe can flood their support forums with bad-news with little chance for telligent to have a response heard above the noise.

This unfortunately leaves a large number of social, hobby-enthusiast, non-commercial and small-business communities stuck on their current CS2.1, CS2007, CS2008 or 2008.5 platform. One pragmatic view is that they can simply stay where they are. Whichever release they have was probably stable-enough, otherwise they would have already migrated to a later release.

Some forums posters are asking for an open-source edition of the product – this isn’t going to happen – why would Telligent offer-up new source code in CS five that is their own invention? How soon before a version competition starts. I wouldn’t without some protection of my source. (I accept that some core parts of CS1.1 and later originated as open source.)

The choices for CS customers unable or unwilling to upgrade are:

1. Stay-put on your current release. It works, it will continue working in 2 years time.
2. Speak to your Telligent representative. Ask now about upgrade options. There may be all sorts of numbers thrown around, but until you ask you don’t know the upgrade price. Try some negotiation. You never know if you don’t ask.
3. Look to other products providing a similar collection of applications. We’re advising customers to consider Dave Burke’s Sueetie to which we contribute programmer resources.

Read more about telligent/community Version 5 here.