My fair and biased opinion on the recent upgrade...

DISCLAIMER:  The following post represents my personal opinions and thoughts, not that of my employer.

As a Telligent employee and weblogs.asp.net blogger, I hate the fact that the recent upgrade caused problems for the weblogs.asp.net community and that it has affected the perception of Telligent as its steward.   I wasnt one of the developers who worked on the project, but I couldnt help but feel a twinge of pain each time I read a post (often rightfully) slamming the team and company who delivered this upgrade.

Long before I joined Telligent, I was one of the more vocal bloggers about the mishandling of the weblogs.asp.net site.   The great irony is that most of my arguments at that time were about how rarely the site was updated to newer versions of .TEXT and CS.   Since that time, its hard to argue that it hasnt gotten much better.  Eventually I became satisfied and frequently impressed with the website changes as we finally were able to take advantage of Community Server's outstanding features. 

This latest release really excited me because it was very timely (coming on the heals of CS 2007's release) and had the potential to allow me to finally have the level of control I wanted over my blog's presentation.

Even with the recent problems, especially the fact that I need to resubmit my javascript, I'm still excited about this release.   In fact, I truly was never all that disturbed by the problems as they were occurring

Was I surprised?  Yes. 

Was it annoying? Sure. 

Would I have preferred an email beforehand?  Absolutely.

I thought about my lack of concern, and had to ask myself why I wasnt more put-off by the problems of this update. 

Was it just because I am now an employee? 

Was my blog nolonger as important to me as before?

The answer, is quite simple.  After coming to work for Telligent, I have met (most of) the people who work on Community Server and the Weblogs.ASP.net websites.  Every one of them are top developers who are professional and thoughtful of every change they make and how it will affect the community.   They have the best intentions of delivering new innovations to the community as cleanly and effectively as possible.

In short, I trust that the people in this company will always try their best to do the right thing for our customers, users, and community.   If you knew the people here, and saw their passion, attention to detail, and work ethic, I have no doubt you would feel the same.

Do we always succeed 100%?  No.

Do we WANT to succeed 100%?  Absolutely.

Will we continue to try and improve our processes to avoid such problems in the future?  Undoubtedly.

As the philosophy goes; "if you arent making any mistakes, then you arent trying hard enough".   I dont know how/why things went awry this time, nor am I in a position to investigate it since I'm just a developer here.  I just trust the weblogs.asp.net team and my company to do the right thing.  They always have in the past, so I see no reason to doubt it in this situation.

I just wanted to share this view with my fellow bloggers.  You can obviously choose to say "Lance has sold-out and is trying to back-up his employer" but I the truth is that I really believe what I said above.  Nobody asked me to write this. In fact, I'm sure there might be some here who would prefer that I didnt even post this...

In the long term, I belive this will be a better site and a better community after this upgrade is stabilized and people realize how major this upgrade was, and how much new flexibility and control you now have to personlize your blog and make it the true home you always wanted.

As my mom always said; "this too shall pass.."