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

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!

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. 

As you are all hopefully well aware by now, we recently released a new collaborative conversation platform: Discussions.  The platform uses several of the core components from most major message board and forums apps on the market today as well as some Listserv specific components all wrapped up in a socially enabled, community-integrated package.  Some may also be aware that we also introduced a beta version of the Discussions platform to a few clients in late 2010.  The beta program was a big success in that we got a lot of great feedback on the platform and were able to fine tune the full release version based on the needs of the market.  That's great news for us, but we also wanted to know how successful our beta clients were in utilizing Discussions beta to deliver several of the same programs that they were relying on our legacy forums for, so we measured the results.

We looked at a timeframe three months prior to migrating three beta clients from forums to discussions to measure web analytics and forums posting activity as a baseline.  We then compared this baseline period to the three month period following the Discussions beta launch to see what changed.

The results were overwhelmingly positive in favor of Discussions.  We measured an increase in three key web traffic analytics data points - page views, unique visitors and average time on page - for the Discussions landing page compared to our Forums landing page.  We also measured an increase in raw # of posts by users in Discussions for all three beta participants, a 42% increase across the board.  More users joined the community and participated in Discussions when compared to those that joined and participated in Forums during the baseline measurement period: a 68% increase overall.  Finally, for those users who registered during the forums measurement and discussions measurement periods only 10% of registrants participated in Forums whereas 24% of new registrants participated in Discussions, respectively.  We are particularly compelled by this last point, that a higher percentage of people who join the community are participating in Discussions as opposed to Forums.

If you would like to learn more about the Discussions platform please check our our Discussions Feature.

We often get a lot of questions in Product about ThePort’s mobile capabilities. Below you’ll find frequently asked questions we’ve heard in the market and if we support them or not.

What is .mobi?
Simply put: .mobi is the technology that allows non mobile sites to have mobile versions.

What does that mean?
It means that the site owner has developed against the .mobi framework to offer a slimmed down version of their site/functionality to be used by mobile devices. A great example is www.digg.com. If you go to http://m.digg.com (their mobile version) you’ll see a slimmed down version of their main site. This version is optimized for mobile devices and houses the main functionality a Digg user needs to interact with and create content on Digg’s site.

Another example is www.espn.com vs. http://m.espn.com. VERY different model, but .mobi all the same.

Does ThePort offer .mobi sites?
ThePort's social platform is built on an XHTML presentation layer. This means all rendered pages will render and operate without fail on all touch devices (Android, iPhone, and Blackberry Touch). However, no work has currently been done to build mobile specific pages in our community. We will continue to investigate this need throughout 2011.

What’s the difference between a .mobi site and a mobile application?
Using the above espn.com example you can go to http://m.espn.com on your phone and check scores, go to your fantasy league, and read articles. However, it’s not always quick and easy. You’ll notice there’s a LOT to do on ESPN’s site. So, to market to their different users they’ve developed mobile applications. ESPN offers over 50 mobile applications for the iPad and iPhone alone! They range from Fantasy Sports applications to the FIFA World Cup application to Sports Score Centers. This allows users to quickly and easily engage and interact with the parts of ESPN’s site that are most important to them.

Does ThePort have any mobile applications?
Not today. We are constantly evolving our platform to better serve our audience and certainly see mobile applications as an opportunity in the future. That being said (as stated above) our current sites render, display, and work wonderfully on any touch mobile device today.

About a month ago, we rolled out the beta release of one of our biggest, most important products to date, our discussions platform.  Discussions was designed to replace our forums platform while at the same time weaving in critical features from an older but still often used technology, Listservs. But this was a fairly big undertaking. Bringing two big technologies together, forums and listservs, and integrating it into our platform was going to take time and we'd need a lot of feedback to get it right. So we made two very big decisions early on in this process:

Make the core of the app as solid as possible up front and leave extras for phase II

This is at the very heart of agile development. The thinking is that until people get their hands on software, you won't really know what bells and whistles they're going to want. But more importantly, until people actually touch something, they may not even know what they want. This has several bonus side effects: it removes guess work from the product team and allows us to get something to market much faster. It shortens the feedback loop and ensures a more stable product upfront. 

While this approach works for us internally at ThePort, it can be frustrating for customers to see what is probably obvious functionality out of the initial release (signatures for example). But bypassing this kind of functionality to focus on the infrastructure at first means we have a stronger, more stable product that we can extend and build upon much more rapidly. After you launch a large product like this, its inevitable that you're going to have issues to address that range from small, nuisance type problems to large, critical, get-em-fixed now kinds of things. And being able to get these issues fixed without having to solve issues in other pieces of functionality at the same time means you can iterate and stabilize much faster.

Real-time feedback with our product team

This was definitely a new concept for us. In a typical product life cycle, you collect feedback a few different ways. Either via tickets, focus groups, emails, or phone calls (you catch my drift). The problem with this style of feedback is that it tends to be very slow in getting good, actionable feedback. This draws out the time to getting fixes / enhancements into place and does a poor job of making sure that requests and defects are properly understood by the product team. With our beta process, we've decided to implement a much more conversational approach to collecting feedback. We recruited some of our more active customers with a history of giving good, solid feeback, and invited them to beta the discussions product. But more importantly, we created a special "discussion" (discussions using our discussions platform. go figure) and had our product team engage w/ the beta testers. If we weren't sure how to style or build a requested enhancement, we'd ask the group "what do you think". If there was a defect that popped up, another beta tester may chime in and say that they'd seen the same thing and offer different steps to reproduce. Sometimes enhancements would be requested that would get a collective cheer; other times we'd push back and ask for further consideration from the client. Either way, the feedback loop was shortened dramatically getting information in the hands of our engineers and product team much more quickly. And the information they did get was always much more valuable and useful

All in all, it is leading to a much more collaborative product management experience where we involve our customers in building the products that they will use day in and day out. We think its been a great road so far and once we get some additional enhancements out there in our next release, we believe the discussions product will be that much better.