I left Microsoft to join Telligent on June 25th, and it’s been an exciting three weeks. I’m learning a lot, having tons of fun, and I think my team is worried about me since I haven’t run away screaming yet. Don’t worry, I won’t. These are all fun challenges. 🙂
What’s most exciting to me has been the freedom and the pace. It was thrilling for me to suggest a change one day and follow-up a couple of days later only to find out it had already been pushed live to the site!
If you didn’t know, my team owns creating a managed experience for customers that want their communities hosted with additional services such as new development, moderation, training, etc. Today we manage several Microsoft communities such as Silverlight.net and Asp.Net, and one of my challenges has been figuring out how to standardize this offering so that we can take on additional business.
I’m also excited about the opportunities we have to build onto the enterprise SKU of Community Server. Specifically we’re looking at things like improved cms, moderation assistance tools, reporting services, advertising platforms, and deeper social networking integration services. There’s lots of ways to grow a product like this, and since our team will be running large scale communities, we’ll have the opportunity to leverage the new stuff first.
If you’d like to be part of the team we’re building, you should know that I’m hiring and I expect to be hiring for a while. At the moment, I have two open positions for developers. I wrote up the official descriptions here. Feel free to contact me if you are interested.