Telligent Community Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some frequently asked questions about our product Telligent Community.

Who is Telligent?

Telligent® builds a community software platform, Telligent Community, that enables our customers to create incredible experiences.

Telligent was created in 2004 and is now part of Verint® Systems.

Learn more about us.

What is Telligent Community?

Telligent Community is a free and commercial community platform that includes a suite of social applications (forums, wikis, blogs, etc.) and social services (likes, ratings, reviews, comments) that our customers use to create communities for their customers.

What is a community platform?

A community platform is a software product that provides an integrated suite of modern user experience applications (forums, wikis, blogs, ideation, media, profiles, calendaring and activity streams) and social services (likes, ratings, reviews, and comments) with a full user experience and RESTful platform APIs.

What is Telligent Community used for?

Our most common use cases are digital marketing communities or customer support communities, but we also work with a lot of private member communities and internal employee networks.

How do analysts view Telligent Community?

Telligent Community is recognized by Forrester and Gartner as a leader and visionary, respectively, in their coverage of the social software market.

How is Telligent Community deployed?

Telligent Community can be run on-premises or in the cloud and Telligent Community gives you 100% control of what your community looks like.

Telligent Community is a developer/designer-friendly product with a well-documented set of RESTful APIs and numerous open source integration kits. Telligent Community is implemented and used by numerous agencies that deliver incredible communities for their customers.

Yes, basically it is awesome sauce for building customer communities. Be sure and check out our Resource Center for case studies, e-books and other great resources about Telligent Community.

What does Telligent Community cost and how is it licensed?

For pricing and licensing information, please see our licensing and pricing page.

What is the most current version of Telligent Community?

Telligent Community 10, download here, was released in February 2017.

What are the system requirements for running Telligent Community on premises?

Running Telligent Community can be as simple as running a single server to multiple clustered servers with dedicated task / job servers. It is designed as a service-oriented architecture that can easily scale up and is built on Microsoft .NET technology, Microsoft IIS web server, Microsoft SQL database server, and Apache Solr search technology.

Please review system requirements for specific details.

What database technology does Telligent Community use?

Telligent Community uses Microsoft SQL Server for its database technology.

Please review system requirements for more details on versions and configuration recommendations.

What search technology does Telligent Community use?

Telligent Community uses the Lucene/Solr open source enterprise search platform as the default internal search provider. Solr is further optimized by Telligent Community to weight search results based on content interactions (analytics) and quality scoring (content and people).

Please see system requirements for specific details.

How often is Telligent Community updated?

Telligent, the commercial entity that looks after Telligent Community, releases a major version of Telligent Community approximately twice per year (one major and one minor version, e.g. 8.0 and 8.5). Service packs are made available every 4-6 weeks. For support customers, we also offer a hotfix escalation process.

What are my options for where Telligent Community runs?

We’re flexible – Telligent Community can be deployed with one of the following options with the ability to change at a later point in time.

For example, a lot of our customers start with our SaaS option and later move to on-premises. Why? As their community becomes a more critical part of their business they want to integrate with other systems.

1. You Host (On Premises) – you run the software ‘on premises’ in your own data center.
2. We Host (SaaS) – we run the software in our SaaS environment.

Basically, we want to make it easy to run our software for whatever way works best for you.

How does Telligent protect customer data within the SaaS environment?

• SaaS Environment hosted in a Rackspace world-class data center that provides a 100% network uptime SLA.  Rackspace holds industry-standard SSAE16 SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO IEC 27001 certification.

• SaaS Services delivered via enterprise-grade infrastructure built for high availability including load-balanced arrays of web servers, clustered database servers,  and highly redundant storage systems.

• SaaS Operations are ITSM/ITIL-based and provide 24x7x365 monitoring and support of all infrastructure and services.

• SaaS Security employs an in-depth framework of threat counter-measures including firewalls, intrusion detection systems, continuous vulnerability scanning, and host-based protection.  All systems feed into a Security Operations Center that provides 24x7x365 monitoring and incident response.

Oh, our software is approved for (and is used in) the US Department of Defense’s Secure Private Internet (SIPRnet). So you could say we take security pretty seriously!

How do I buy a Commercial Edition of Telligent Community?

Well, that is quite simple. Drop us a note at telligent-sales@verint.com and we’ll follow-up.

What does a typical deployment look like?

A typical commercial community will have two web servers and a single database server. On average, you can expect each web server to handle 120,000 – 150,000 page views per month.

Our largest customers have 15+ servers, but these are for communities that serve over 1b requests per month (page views, RSS, and API calls) such as the Microsoft Xbox community.

PS, we would be more than happy to sell you 15 servers, but you probably don’t need that many.

What languages are available?

Telligent Community uses double-byte storage and supports right-to-left layouts – that is a technical way of saying that we support content and layouts in any language. Now, technically we haven’t tried Klingon, but our developers assure us that it would work too. We also have partners, like Lionbridge, that have built some great tools to auto-translate content so people in Germany could see content that was posted in English auto-translated to German (and vice-versa).

In addition to allowing any content to be stored, we also support language translations of the application itself. These include things like the menus and other display elements. We support the following (in addition to English):

• Chinese
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Spanish

Our language translations are simply XML files that you can modify and we have customers, such as Office 365, that have translated our community software into over 27 languages! 如何真棒是什么？

Can Telligent Community capture user profile data through registration, social networks, and other systems of record?

Yes, community managers and administrators determine what data is captured in addition to common user information (i.e., username, email address).

Additional data fields may be set up as required. Telligent Community also allows for authentication and registration through Open Standards (OAuth), enabling users to sign in and create user accounts using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other OAuth providers.

Additional profile data can be synced automatically from other sources such as Active Directory, SalesForce or proprietary data stores.

Does Telligent Community display user profiles on the site?

Yes, each member in Telligent Community has a unique profile page that displays relevant information the user provides at registration or after joining the community. Users may provide as much or as little information about themselves as they like (including profile fields required at the time of registration).

Note: the user profile page can be disabled for scenarios where the community is integrated with an existing website. For example, customers that integrate us with popular CMSs like Sitecore typically prefer that the CMS host the user profile.

What details about the user does the profile include?

The community manager may create any profile fields and decide which of those fields are required/optional, which are displayed, and which are editable/read-only. Profile data can be synced automatically from other sources such as Active Directory, SalesForce or proprietary data stores.

Is Telligent Community optimized for SEO?

Yes, Telligent Community is optimized for search engines. Content title, body text, tag and other elements used for SEO are published within the page in an SEO friendly manner. Furthermore, the URL can be optimized by the end publisher to control what keywords are shown. All content is accessible via standard links and an auto-generated XML sitemap helps popular search engines quickly find content. Lastly, other techniques are used to ensure the search engines only find relevant content with some content being automatically blocked from search engines.

How is Telligent Community content searched?

Telligent Community uses the Lucene/Solr open source enterprise search platform as the default internal search provider. Solr is further optimized by Telligent Community to weight search results based on content interactions (analytics) and quality scoring (content and people). Search results are also integrated with the security infrastructure to trim search results based on the searching user’s permissions – in other words, you can’t find what you aren’t allowed access to.

Does Telligent Community support Open Search?

Yes, Telligent Community supports Open Search and can be integrated with other search platforms already in use.

Can Telligent Community personalize content?

Yes, the widget-and-layout framework in Telligent Community allows for extensive customizability, including the ability to create bespoke content pages at the site and/or group level. However, we recommend integrating with a CMS for delivering deeper personalization of targeted content.

Can Telligent Community help with content discovery?

Yes, Telligent Community includes a content recommendation engine, an “Ask a question” feature that promotes potential answers while a question is being asked, and a weekly or daily email newsletter that contains content personalized to the end user based on analytics and the recommendation engine.

Can Telligent Community help me meet new and interesting people?

Ok, we put that in to see if you’re actually reading these frequently asked questions. But the answer is yes, our communities connect people around the world.

Can Telligent Community manage question/answer tracking?

Yes, Telligent Community’s forums application includes question & answer threads with a verification workflow. This works as follows:

• People post questions in the forums and invited other users to suggest answers.
• Either the question asker or community manager may mark any reply as a verified answer.
• Verified answers may also later be rejected and replaced with a new answer if information subsequently changes, invalidating the original answer.
• Individual answers may also be rated by site users.
• Answers can be promoted into wiki articles as well.

Can Telligent Community manage threaded discussions?

Yes, Telligent Community’s forums application supports open discussion threads. Community managers determine which types of discussions are allowed in an individual forum, enabling users to select either Q&A or discussion, if both are enabled.

Can Telligent Community handle ratings and reviews?

Yes, Telligent Community uses a rating service to allow people to like and/or rate content, as well as a commenting service to enable more detailed feedback. These services are not necessarily tied to user generated content types (e.g., blog posts, forum threads, etc.) only and may be extended to be used on external content, such as a product page hosted on a separate content management system.

How are blogs created within Telligent Community?

Blogs may be self-provisioned and community managers can put in rules, such as only accounts with an email address belonging to the company may create blogs. Blogs can also be easily created by community managers through a new blog wizard.

Can blog content be posted anywhere?

Yes, blogs may be added anywhere within the community and through the APIs blogs can be embedded within other websites. However, unlike the popular WordPress blogging platform, Telligent Community is best used as a pure blogging platform vs. a hybrid blog/CMS platform. Instead we recommend integrating with a web content management system such as Sitecore.

Can user-generated content from social networks be published in the community?

Yes, Telligent Community provides several capabilities to include content from social networks:

• Widgets and plugins to pull content from broader social networks like Facebook and Twitter. These components can be configured to target specific search terms.
• Blog mirroring configures a Telligent Community blog to mirror content from a public RSS feed.
• Relevant updates from Twitter can be included in the site’s activity stream.

Can Telligent Community syndicate brand-generated and user-generated content?

Yes, through Telligent Community’s APIs, content can be published and pushed from Telligent Community to any website. This includes:

• Remote iFrame widgets
• Embedded native functionality
• Direct Platform API (RESTful web service)
• RSS feeds

For Web Content Management Systems Telligent Community provide open source SDKs designed to integrate directly into those WCM platforms (see Telligent Community SDK for Sitecore).

Can Telligent Community embed/encode videos and other rich content?

Yes, the included HTML5 video transcoding service enables videos of any format to be uploaded to Telligent Community. These videos transcoded to HTML5 are playable in the browser without requiring client-side plugins (including mobile devices). Video, audio and other rich media can be added to any user-generated content through the standard rich text editor.

Can Telligent Community provide document previews of popular Office document formats?

Yes, Telligent Community includes a document preview capability which allows for common document formats such as Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Excel, Word and other document types such as PDF to be displayed in the browser and on mobile devices without requiring the corresponding applications to be installed.

Can Telligent Community help clients manage user activity within the community?

Yes, Telligent Community provides a number of tools to help manage user activity within the community:

• Automated rules engine – automate actions within the community.
• Keyword filtering – remove/replace keywords that occur in content.
• Whitelist HTML filtering – whitelist of allowed HTML that can be included in user-generated content.

Does Telligent Community include tools to control spam and other types of unwanted content?

Yes, Telligent Community provides a number of tools to help manage user activity within the community:

• Automated rules engine – automate actions within the community.
• Keyword filtering – remove/replace keywords that occur in content.
• Whitelist HTML filtering – whitelist of allowed HTML that can be included in user-generated content.
• Auto-Spam Management – enables community managers to establish rules to measure user-generated content against configured scoring thresholds prior to publication.
• Forum and comment moderation – ability to move content into a moderation queue prior to publication.
• Abuse management – tools that allow end users to vote content as abusive to help community managers moderate content.

What security controls does Telligent Community provide?

Telligent Community provides extensive security controls. Telligent Community makes use of authentication (validating identity) and authorization (grant that identity rights or denying them rights). Authentication is can be self-registration, invitation-based, or private.

Authentication can be configured to use a variety of different sources, such as open standards OAuth providers (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), SAML, LDAP, Active Directory, and any custom single sign-on provider.

Authorization is done through roles which are logical groupings of community members. Example roles: Everyone, Anonymous, Community Manager, etc. You can create your own roles to model your business needs. Applications within Telligent Community expose permissions controlling what actions are allowed. For example, read a blog, post to a blog, delete a blog, edit a blog, create a blog. Permissions are granted to roles and users are assigned to roles.

Can Telligent Community ensure the authenticity of users and content?

Yes, Telligent Community provides several mechanisms for ensuring authenticity. This starts with the authentication system, which can use trusted identity sources such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. All content passes through a set of rules before being published and customers have the opportunity to add additional safety measures and checks to ensure content meets certain standards prior to publication.

Does Telligent Community support permissions and access levels to different users?

Yes, all users in Telligent Community are assigned to one or more roles (logical groupings of community members). Roles can then be assigned permissions that dictate what a user in the role may do within the site. These permissions are configurable at the site, group and application (blog, forum, wiki, etc.) level to enable very fine grain control over who views published content.

Can Telligent Community restrict who has access to content?

Yes, this is a fundamental strength of Telligent Community. Through the configurable permissions and access levels, content that a user does not have permission to see is never seen within the site. Content is automatically trimmed from search, activity streams, forums, RSS, APIs and more.

Does Telligent Community have an API?

Yes, Telligent Community was designed first and foremost as a platform. This includes:

• Native API
• Direct Platform API (RESTful web service)
• Remote iFrame widgets
• Embedded native functionality
• RSS feeds

We also provide a number of open source SDKs (published on GitHub) and tools for creating new UX using Telligent Community’s Widget Studio development tools that retain API compatibility with the platform APIs.

Can Telligent Community integrate with my website?

Yes, Telligent Community is designed to easily integrate with 3rd party Web Content Management platforms. Integration can be as simple as shared sign-on (SSO), aggregating Telligent Community RSS feeds, embedding Telligent Community iFrame widgets or can be more natively integrated directly through Telligent Community’s platform API (RESTful web services) and native SDKs designed specifically for Web Content Management Systems (such as Sitecore).

Does Telligent Community include gamification features?

Yes, Telligent Community includes a full gamification, rules engine and points systems. The rules engine allows non-technical community managers to create rules which can be used for gamification of the community: allowing users to earn recognition through badges, unlock new capabilities, and participate in leaderboards.

Does Telligent Community analyze the actions and behaviors of users?

Yes, Telligent Community provides a number of analytics capabilities focused around user behavior, user reputation and content quality scoring. This quality scoring features tracks interactions of the user and the content they publish and applies internal scores/weights to both. Those score impact where content shows up, whose content gets promoted.

Can Telligent Community recommend content?

Yes, using the quality scoring of both content and users the recommendation engine can filter content that is most appropriate to either the user or the content being viewed.

Does Telligent Community measure the quality of content through readership, comments, and ratings?

Yes, Telligent Community measures content contributions and interactions through a set of analytics capabilities delivered as site widgets (reusable UX element). These widgets may be configured to create a Telligent Analytics dashboard at the site level and/or within individual groups.

Does Telligent Community’s analytics include a community health or ROI?

Yes, Telligent Community includes a Community Health Summary that measures the “heartbeat” of the community (or group). Telligent have been investing in making the analytics data available to specialized 3rd party analytics tools as community data is often combined with other digital marketing activities.

Does Telligent Community integrate with CRM systems?

Yes, Telligent Community integrates with a variety of CRM systems, the most popular of which is Salesforce. Telligent provides an open source Salesforce SDK on GitHub that enables customers to integrate activities, cases, identity and more between Salesforce and the community. Custom integrations have been done for SAP as well as Microsoft Dynamics though the Telligent Community platform API.

Does Telligent Community integrate with CMS systems?

Yes, Telligent Community provides deep integration with CMS systems this is a fundamental part of our go-to-market strategy. The best examples of this is Telligent’s long-standing commitment to Sitecore. Telligent Community provides a full suite of integration samples and a Sitecore specific SDK on GitHub. The base Telligent Community .NET SDK can be used to integrate with any ASP.NET content management system includes Umbraco, Sitefinity, Kentico and others.

Does Telligent Community integrate with analytics systems?

Yes, Telligent Community integrates with the analytics providers including Google Analytics, Tableau, Omniture, Webtrends, Sitecore and Smarter Stats. Telligent Community has added specific integration points for web analytics products to make it very easy to enable web analytics tracking.

Is Telligent Community accessible from mobile devices?

Yes, Telligent Community is fully responsive and adaptive and will work “as-is” on any modern mobile device. Additionally, Telligent Community provides a mobile SDK built with Cordova (on GitHub) that allows agencies and partners to tailor a native mobile experience for iOS and Android.

What social / community applications does Telligent Community include?

Telligent Community includes the following applications. These applications can be organized into groups or can be used separately:

• Forums
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Ideation
• Media / File Galleries
• Calendaring
• Polls
• Pages
• Private Messages
• Chat

What social / community services does Telligent Community include?

Below is a partial list of the services that Telligent Community includes. These services are available as RESTful APIs and can be easily added to other content. For example, if you are a customer of Sitecore you can use these services to add a more interactive experience around your Sitecore content:

• Comments
• Ratings
• Reviews
• Likes
• Tags
• Reputation
• Points
• Badging

How does Telligent Community organize applications?

Telligent Community organizes applications into groups. Groups are effectively micro-communities that can have their own permissions and members. Groups provide a logical mapping for business use cases. For example, you could create a public group for product support and a private partner enablement group. Telligent Community provides a set of applications that are used to manage the community:

• Profiles
• Search
• Control Panel
• Rules Engine
• Abuse Management

What integrations are available?

There are several integrations available with more on the way. We publish all of the integrations on GitHub with full source:

• Telligent Community SDK for Sitecore – use Telligent Community functionality in Sitecore.
• Telligent Community Samples for Sitecore – samples for using Telligent Community in Sitecore.
• Telligent Community WebParts for SharePoint – use Telligent Community functionality in SharePoint.
• SharePoint Connector for Telligent Community – use SharePoint functionality in Telligent Community.
• SalesForce Connector for Telligent Community – use SalesForce functionality in Telligent Community.
• Lync Connector for Telligent Community – use Lync functionality in Telligent Community.
• Mobile SDK for Telligent Community (Cordova-based project) – built iOS and Android apps for Telligent Community.
• Telligent Community .NET SDK – use Telligent Community within any .NET application.