Exciting news at ThePort!  Historically ThePort has offered its services via a 100% SaaS model with our hardware stack sitting in a local Atlanta based datacenter.  We've had enormous success with our SaaS model; however, it's clear that many businesses are beginning to accept service via the cloud as a viable alternative to SaaS or even traditional On Premise delivery models.  As we continue to grow our service offerings to enterprise system vendors, we are very aware of the need to expand our delivery options to meet the need of a diverse customer base.  

Over the past few months we've taken a huge step in that direction by fully installing an instance of ThePort Social in Amazon EC2.  The deployment is complete and fully tested, but is currently utilized for internal testing and demonstration purposes.  At this time we have no plans to migrate any customer communities from our physical data; however, we are capable of hosting any new customer sites in the cloud.  The move has allowed us to certify that our technology works like a charm in the cloud.  As an added benefit we've also been able to certify running our platform with a SQL 2008 database, as opposed to our current production environment which runs on SQL 2005.  

Now that SaaS and Cloud delivery options have a nice fat check mark next to them, it's time to turn our focus to the next hurdle: On Premise installs packages.  We have a major release slated for Q2 this year to address that specific issue.  Many more details will be coming over the next few months.  In the meantime we will be hard at work to bring the same great collaborative tools we currently offer behind the firewall!

Over the last several months we've heard you loud and clear regarding site performance.  While we've been heavily focused on developing new features that we hope you'll love, we also recognize the need to continue to improve and enhance the most import feature of your communities: performance.  Our latest release was this past Saturday morning and our team heavily focused on large improvements to both general spread and page load times within your communities. 

Initial tests in our QA environment have been extremely encouraging.  We've seen increases in page load times from 39% up to 80+ % for several highly trafficked system pages.  Obviously, if this holds true in our production environments it would be quite a noticeable improvement.  We will be working over the next several weeks on quantifying the improvement in our production environment.  But, for now we figured it might be worthwhile to ask you directly: are you seeing an improvement?  If our QA data mirrors reality even somewhat, you should see a very noticeable boost in speed.

So, what exactly did we do?  This change boils down to a comprehensive overhaul in the way many pages and modules retrieve their data.  By taking increased advantage of server caching, we have eliminated several unnecessary calls to our database that may result in delayed response times.  In the simplest terms, when a new page is loaded there are tons of small pieces of information that need to be retrieved - requiring a trip to the database and back to render that piece of data.  With our recent changes, we're taking more advantage of cache to "store" pertinent pieces of information for re-use.  These pieces of data become immediately available the next time a user hits a page that might require that data.  As more and more users navigate the site, more data will be stored in cache.  So, performance will actually increase during peak usage.  Logically, this may seem a bit backwards, but it does make sense.  More activity = more information requested from database = more information stored in cache = more information immediately available for the next user.  Now, using cache to optimize performance is not a new concept.  We've used cache in our system for quite some time.  Consider this most recent release an example of "cache optimization" - we're getting smarter about how we use cache to improve performance.  We will continue to build on this improvement in upcoming releases as well.

System-wide, our peak usage hours fall in weekday afternoons (EST).  However, its important to note that the above improvements will be noticed most readily when your specific site is most active.  Our team is very excited about these updates and we hope you and your members are seeing huge speed boosts!  Don't hesitate to leave a comment with your observations or questions about the change.

For those clients who have been with us for quite some time you are probably used to the familiar quarterly releases we typically do 4 times a year.  Some of these quarterly release focus on major functionality roll outs while others are more platform improvement driven.  I just wanted to post a quick note to let you all know that we will not be performing our typical Q3 or Q4 release this year.  That's not to say we won't be releasing enhancements, fixes and other updates throughout the rest of the year.  We've simply changed our release schedule to better accommodate the current needs of the platform.  So, please feel free to continue to post feature requests and share your suggestions.  These will still be taken into consideration as we continue to enhance the platform.

What has changed?

Through the end of the year we will be pushing both weekly revision releases and monthly minor releases.  Revision releases will be very low impact and will always be pushed on Tuesday.  Minor releases are low to medium impact (read: potential downtime, but very limited if so) and are scheduled for the second Tuesday of each remaining month.  Release notes will be published in our release announcements blog for these releases.  The next minor release is scheduled for 9/13.  Dates are subject to change, but we will be sure to inform you if that's the case.

Why the change?

Quarterly releases have served us well in the past as we've built our platform to what it is today.  However, we feel that the current, most pressing need is to address platform performance and speed.  Because these enhancements tend to be iterative in nature (e.g. build -> test -> release -> measure improvement -> do it all again) we feel that pushing updates monthly will better serve our goal to improve platform performance quickly. 

How do we find out about enhancements and new features now?

The first place to check is always our release blog, which can be found here: http://community.theport.com/releaseannouncements.  The blog focuses on bug fixes and enhancements to existing functionality that may be of interest to you and your end users.  In addition to the blog each release may be accomodated by production release notes.  We will distribute these as needed depending on the types of functionality that may change in any upcoming release.  Any end user impacting changes will be documented and distributed per our normal process.

Will quarterly releases resume in 2012?

We plan to re-evaluate the need for our major quarterly releases by the end of the year and will inform all users of the go forward plan by early 2012.

Thanks,
ThePort Network Team

I wanted to take a few minutes to explain a few changes coming to community.theport.com. When we launched this community 18 months ago, it was designed to deliver tips, helpful docs, and a direct line of communication to ThePort to our customers and partners. Since then, we've added hundreds of users, thousands of discussion board entries, blogs, and documents to a growing and thriving community. Finally the time has come to do a little re-organization. Over the next several weeks, we're going to be doing some house keeping that includes:

• New home page and navigation. We're simplifying the home page and navigation to make it easier to find what you need. Get a sneak preview here.
• Removal of old groups. Formerly we used out groups architecture to segment information. We've realized this is far too silo'd an experience of our users so we're putting all of our documentation into one global doc repository and using tabs and folders to organize the data.  See a preview of the global doc repository here.
• New points: We're going to be tweaking our point totals a bit and introducing new badges. We're hoping to incentivize in some way more interaction within the site. We'll also be rolling out a "ThePort Employee" badge so you'll be able to quickly and easily identify ThePort employees
• Documentation: For the developers out there we have already rolled out a comprehensive overhaul of our web services documentation. Coming in the next 3-4 weeks we will be doing the same for our tpXSLT framework. Hopefully this will make it easier to build out new widgets and pages on our system.

We'll start rolling these changes out next week. If you have any feedback, don't hesitate to leave us a comment or two!

About 2 months ago we decided it was time to revamp our website. We'd had our previous version for about 18 months, had added a slew of new features in that time, and had brand new messaging we wanted to communicate. So, we sat down and came up with a few critical features we needed to incorporate into this new site:

1. Ease of use in updating content
2. SEO Friendly
3. Complete control over look and feel

As we started to evaluate our options, one crazy thought occurred to us: even though we're fundamentally a social platform, we also have all of the pieces available to craft a website.

• Can we easily update content?  Yep, through our content blocks and pages infrastructure.
• Are we SEO friendly? Absolutely, we have better URL masking capabilities than most social platforms, we allow for the easy management of meta tags, keywords, and have very clean markup.
• And do we allow for complete control over look and feel? We most certainly do. Our customers have access to header, footer, and the body of pages all via our tpXSLT framework. This allows total control over a page and makes it very straight forward to roll out simple content pages. 

So, we decided to build our new website on our own platform. This allowed us to easily infuse content modules right into our website. If you go to www.theport.com, you'll see a handful of our modules on here to bring rich, dynamic content to what formerly would have been a static site. And we're just scratching the surface here. We plan to add more dynamic and relevant content using our platform to make it easy for visitors to gain access to the information they need when they need it. 

Wanna learn more? Reach out to us via our message boards or contact me directly and we'd be happy to work with you!

Just a quick note that as you already know our Q2 release is live as of this past Saturday morning.  The release introduces some new capabilities as well as some tweaks and enhancements to our existing offering.  You can find more details by viewing our release webinar or reviewing our release notes.

For community administrators we've also updated two key admin guides you may be interested in: the admin guide and getting started guide have been updated and republished. 

We're excited to hear your feedback on the updates.  Please feel free to shoot us a note via the support discussions or, if you have more ideas, share them via our feature request blog.  We hope you enjoy the new features!

This morning just after 10 AM EDT our data center encountered an unexpected outage in the course of planned maintenance. Our redundant systems took effect and the downtime was limited to a 1-2 minute span from 10:08 AM EDT to 10:10 AM EDT. At approximately 11:45 AM EDT the data center again took our systems off line as a necessary precaution to prevent damage. It is ThePort’s policy to report any planned downtime ahead of time to our clients, however due to the nature of the outage we were unable to notify clients prior to the downtime in this instance. While the outage was unplanned, the maintenance was completed as planned and system availability was restored as of roughly 12:05 PM EDT. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused you and your community members. We are currently working with our data center to ensure the root cause of this unplanned outage is thoroughly investigated. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

As I sit at the Suiteworld conference here in San Francisco and listen to how NetSuite has built their system on the cloud and how that's enabled them to be more agile, I'm reminded of our story here at ThePort and how we're in a unique position to bring social to any kind of system, anywhere, anytime. How do we do this? We do it through cloud based OEM.

Let's back up a second though. What is OEM? It stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer and is the idea that someone may  produce a piece of equipment or hardware or software that is then resold under someone else's brand. In the software world this happens all the time when a software company produces a piece of software that is then subsumed into another piece of software. It could be a database, a UI component, or anything in between. But OEM in the software world has always almost always shipped with the software as part of the code. This is where we're a little different.

We are what we call a cloud based OEM provider. Its somewhat similar to Platform as a Service (PaaS) but the main difference is that a cloud OEM provides fully functional pieces that can easily be baked into another piece of software. For instance, our discussions platform is a great example of cloud OEM. We're able to easily white label this part of our platform, host it, and bake it right into another platform with relative ease. Same with our Activity Stream / Points platform. A partner could then take the points system (or parts of it) and easily embed it into their system. 

So what are the benefits? The ability to rapidly plug a new feature into your platform is the first and most obvious benefit. The rapid pace at which we upgrade these tools is another. Instead of seeing upgrades once a year, you're going to see upgrades every month (if not more frequently). Lastly, we incur the hosting burden. We make sure the system is up and running and performing as well as possible. 

That's right. Despite rumors of its demise, we don't see email going away anytime soon. Especially in the enterprise and non-profit realms where email is still a critical communication tool. We absolutely see social networks, texting, IM, and technologies yet to be discovered reducing the need for email over time. But is it going away in the near future? No way.

To that end, we are making two critical improvements to our email delivery system:

1) In the next few days we will be deploying an enhanced email monitoring system. We have a fairly lightweight monitor right now but its simply not doing a good enough job telling us the overall health of the email system. Our new system will actively monitor how many emails are sent and if we start to see a delay in email delivery, the system will notify us. Most importantly, we're separating this monitoring system from the remainder of our platform. That way, if there's a systemic problem, the monitor will be unaffected (this may seem obvious but you'd be surprised!)

Here is a screenshot of the system we will be deploying (note: this is what happens when engineers design something. Our UI team would like me to be clear that they had nothing to do with this!)


It may be difficult to see but we'll keep a rolling 30 day snapshot of the overall health of the system. This will help us trend how email delivery is going and spot any issues that are repetitive. 

2) Coming sometime this summer will be another enhancement -- we'll start using Amazon's Simple Email Service for email delivery. When we first built our email system, our needs were small and delivery less critical. So we used our own internal SMTP servers to send email. But as demand has grown, as well as stability needs, we require a more "professional" email delivery system. Amazon's cloud service should provide for greater overall stability and higher email delivery success rates. This will be soft launched in June with a full deployment throughout the summer. 

We're looking forward to getting both of these improvements out the door. We'd love to hear feedback!

Just a quick teaser about some of the major enhancements we have planned for our discussions platform.  As you may know Discussions was released in beta format in October 2010.  We had 3 primary beta participants who helped us define the product a great deal.  Their help was invaluable to us in planning the Generally Available (GA) release of Discussions in February 2011.  We think the platform is in a great spot and light years ahead of our legacy forums application.  (Incidentally, if you're still on our legacy forums application we have a free upgrade path available.  Take advantage of our shiny new technology!)

Of course, we recognize there are still areas that could be enhanced.  We've had a ton of user feedback since the GA release that has helped us craft a roadmap for the Discussions platform.  Here's a sampling of major enhancements we have planned.  The timeframe for these is still TBD.  Some of them will be coming as soon as our Q2 release or maybe even sooner, but we have no concrete timeframes just yet.  As with all new functionality releases we will have much more detail available before the functionality actually goes live in the form of webinars, training videos, etc.

• Search- We're removing Discussions completely from enterprise search and building out an advanced search capability.  First, removing discussion posts from enterprise search will help clean up search overall and make sure content is more relevant.  Adding in an advanced search capability will simply expand our current keyword search to allow for search by post author, post date or date range, single discussion search, etc.
• Paging- To date we've used the paging control from other parts of the platform within discussions.  The paging control works fine in several areas, but is a bit over extended in the discussions platform where paging is so prevalent.  By re-writing our paging control we can make the user experience a bit more streamlined.  For example, using the back button on your browser will scroll you through actual pages of replies. 
• UI Enhancements- We are slightly re-designing the discussions main landing page to make the content a bit more relevant.  More details on this to follow, but we will be building several new widgets to help users find relevant content quickly and easily when they hit the page.
• Recent and unread posts- One of the often requested features we've heard is the ability for users to see all recent posts across discussions, especially those that they may not have read yet.  We have a solution in the works to meet this need.

Hopefully you'll like these adjustments!

Hopefully you have taken notice that over the past several months our Product Management and Support teams have been heavily investing in content for community.theport.com.  We certainly have more room to improve, but we're thrilled with the progress we've made and feel that using our platform to support clients and end users has given us a much better pulse on user feedback. 

One of the most beneficial things we've done is move our feature requests out of our support ticketing system and into a simple collaborative blog.  An immediate benefit we noticed is that the blog is public and everyone can see what other users are requesting and lend support via commenting.  If you haven't already, I encourage you to check it out.  There is a ton of great feedback already from several different client instances.  Feel free to scan what's already out there or enter your own request.  I recommend doing a quick blog search if you're unsure if something has already been requested.  We make an effort to put ourselves in the shoes of our end users as often as possible.  That's really what this community is all about.  By using our software to support our end users we use the platform much more like our end users and hopefully offer better support because of it. 

Even with a commitment to use the platform every day with an eye toward improving user experience, we certainly prefer that our users tell us directly what they'd like to see added, subtracted or tweaked within the platform.  Our product management team sits down and reviews every outstanding feature request at least once a quarter.  We make an effort to keep communication lines open via commenting and a categorization model for each request (post).  As a refresher we use:

• Pending Review- awaiting a review by our product management team or we need more info to determine how to proceed.
• Accepted- planned for a future release.  If we have a timeframe we will add it in a comment as well.
• Implemented- already released.
• Archived- not planned for release.  If possible we'll try to provide a workaround or a reasoning for not implementing to keep you in the loop.

Big or small, we'd love to hear your feedback. 

Hi all,
Note that there are several rest apis that are new to the April minor release:

http://community.theport.com/api/CreateProfileComment
http://community.theport.com/api/CreateSocialObjectComment
http://community.theport.com/api/AcceptFriendRequest
http://community.theport.com/api/CreateDiscussionTopic
http://community.theport.com/api/CreateDiscussionTopicReply

Grab you a dev key and have fun.  

Just a quick note that we're going to be down at our datacenter near downtown Atlanta next Tuesday, April 12th at 5am for some planned maintenance on our systems. We will be:

1. Adding a new database enclosure. All of your awesome blogs, photos, status updates, and groups need more room to expand. 
2. Replacing one of our main application servers. This server in particular runs some of our email components and we've had issues of late where the emails weren't being sent in a timely fashion. So we have a shiny brand new server to toss into the mix. We should defintely see a more stable application environment because of this replacement.
3. Upping the memory on our web farm. We'll be going from 8GB per server to 16GB. We're hoping this gives us a little more room to grow on these boxes and maybe increase performance a bit. We'll keep you posted on this last part.

Maintenance will begin at 5am and downtime should be limited to less than 10 minutes. 

At ThePort, we make our best efforts to do releases often, getting the latest features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements out the door.  Up until now, we had a dedicated quarterly release where we'd push all out big fancy new features and then do code pushes whenever we needed without a set schedule. In 2010, we did 5 big releases (even though there are only 4 quarters in a year -- we got greedy one quarter and did two!) and about 100 other small patch releases. As our organization matures, and you our customers require more consistency and stability, we've decided to roll out a new release schedule. Its not all that different than what we had before; it just has a little more routine to it. Without further ado, here it is:

• Quarterly Releases
  • As the name suggests, this will be done quarterly
  • Release date usually set about 30-45 days out
  • Major enhancements, performance tweaks, and bug fixes come out in this release
  • Always done on a Saturday at 4:30 am EST to minimize downtime
• Minor Releases
  • Always the first Tuesday of every month
  • Major bug fixes and performance enhancements released
  • Occasionally new features
  • Always done at 6:30 am EST
  • Very low impact
• Patch Releases
  • Every Tuesday
  • Cosmetic changes only (css, templates, etc)
  • Never new features
  • Virtually no impact

We think this release schedule will allow us to be more nimble than before b/c now we have a consistent release schedule.  We're excited at the prospect of getting you results more quickly than we were able to before. So be on the look out!

The above release schedule can also be found here -- http://community.theport.com/ReleaseSchedule 

For detailed release notes, check out our Release Blog here -- http://community.theport.com/ReleaseAnnouncements 

Edit: as with any system, especially SaaS, we may from time to time have to do an unscheduled release (hotfix) to address an emergency issue or something similar. We'll always notify you if such a case arises. 

As you may know we have been experiencing intermittent issues with delayed e-mail delivery for system generated e-mails recently. Specifically, the impact you would have experienced would have been delays to receive subscription e-mails, e-mail notifications or e-mail digests.

First off, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you over the recent weeks. The good news is that we have identified a root cause and have a plan in place to ensure that these issues do not become systemic. Essentially, what has happened is that one of our application servers has been experiencing intermittent performance degradation to the point that it begins running very slowly. The degraded performance causes back ups in processing of requests. Hence, outgoing system e-mails are delayed . This performance degradation has occurred twice over the last three weeks and in both cases a server re-boot has restored normal service. However, due to the short timeframe in which we've experienced two similar issues we have decided to replace the equipment. While the equipment is still functional, we are expediting the replacement strategy to make sure we prevent future e-mail delivery issues.

Again, sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you or your members. Please feel free to ask any questions in our support message boards or send us a ticket at support.theport.com if you have further questions or concerns.

- ThePort Product and Development Team