Telligent acquires Dozing Dogs CMS

By RHoward

October 03, 2005

James shared the news here: http://www.coveryourasp.net/Technical/TheTelligenti, but we're thrilled to announce that Telligent has acquired this popular and powerful CMS system. We haven't announced how we'll package the new CMS solution with Community Server, but version 1.2 will contain some basic CMS capablities. Version 2.0 of Community Server will also have full integration of the CMS system.

The Telligenti

James Shaw's

October 2, 2005

The hell with it, I'm blogging the MVP conference. It's been great, but probably not for the reasons that it should have been!

I admit it; I didn't attend many sessions - I'm here for the ASP Insiders summit next week too and in comparison we get one-on-one versions of the same presentations next week. Instead of sharing Anders, etc with 1500 others, we get him in a room with 40 of us. I can't wait.

Instead, the Telligenti have been sat in the corner of the McKinley room (some would say "holed up") for a couple of days. But oh man, we've got some really cool stuff done. Those of you familiar with the Dozing Dogs CMS will have heard of Snippets - a simple control to display content from the database.

Well, we've got snippets into Community Server 1.2! Super cool; you can now move the mouse over content and do the whole click-edit-save that makes people so passionate about CMS.

Let me come clean here - we're far enough down the road to let you into the "secret" (that many of you figured out of course).

Exclusive for my blog readers - Telligent is acquiring Dozing Dogs and all rights to the CMS.

Planned for version 2.0 (due late 2006), Community Server will include CMS functionality. Already there are some amazing Atlas-related enhancements in 1.2 (and many more planned) that will make the current CMS look like Notepad. Plus of course fully integrated forums, blogs, picture and file galleries..oh man, CS 1.2 and 2.0 are kicking ass.

It's my 1 month anniversary today btw. Thanks guys.

Hi Everyone!

If you haven't heard the news, then I'm excited to be the first to let you know that Telligent has purchased Dozing Dogs. I'd like to use this email to share some information with you, our Dozing Dogs customers, on what the future holds.

Telligent (www.telligent.com), if you're not familiar with us, is the company that purchased Dozing Dogs. Telligent does 2 things primarily:

1. We build commercial software - Community Server (www.communityserver.org) 
2. We provide project based services work, for example: www.gearlog.com

Community Server is a collaboration platform used by sites such as blogs.msdn.com, forums.asp.net, microsoftgadgets.com - to name some of the higher profile sites. As a platform Community Server not only offers blogging, web discussions (forums), and photo sharing but through commercial add-ons also allows for NNTP access, email capabilities (reply and compose through email), as well as a file gallery and much more.

A common request from Community Server customers is Content Management: the ability to manage all site content through a web UI; thus the acquisition of Dozing Dogs. Dozing Dogs brings a new set of capabilities and offerings for Community Server and will in turn offer Dozing Dogs customers a larger development and support team, more features through Community Server, and lastly the ability to grow the CMS capabilities further.

Dozing Dogs as a software solution will continue to be sold and supported. Our intent is to incorporate some features into the community licensed version of Community Server, but to also offer CMS as a commercial add-on for Community Server as part of our Professional and Enterprise editions. Some of this work is happening now in the 2.0 version of Community Server we are preparing for release in December. However, the real CMS release will be part of the 3.0 version of Community Server.

As a customer of Dozing Dogs, our top priority is to keep you as a customer. If there are any questions either myself or James can answer, please let us know. Further more, if there are ideas or features you would like to see in future releases let us know.

Here are some of the things you can expect to see in the future:

• Product development and support team - We have 6 fulltime developers, in addition to James, who focus on developing Community Server and now Dozing Dogs. We also have a fulltime test team to help ensure we keep quality high; Telligent currently has a staff of 40+ people. 
• Pluggable Pipeline - The CMS publishing process will be modularized to allow for participation in the publishing of content. No modules means you edit, save, and you're done. Adding modules will allow capabilities such as approval, workflow, auditing, notifications, etc. Our goal is to build this pipeline to also enable our customers to easily participate in the processing of content 
• Inline editing - We're using some of this now for Community Server v2.0. Inline editing allows you to edit content, if you are a content manager, without leaving your page! Just click-type-done. 
• Integration with Community Server - Using some of the advanced tools for managing users, permissions, roles, search and so-on the CMS product will get some great new capabilities for free. 
• .NET 2.0 - The 3.0 version of Community Server and CMS will be based on ASP.NET 2.0. Currently we're planning this release for June of 2006.

If you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, or ideas (or even just want to say hi) please do so

Rob Howard - rhoward@telligent.com
James Shaw - jshaw@telligent.com (or still at james@dozingdogs.com)