Now that VivoSocial is now open source, I'm curious if anyone has had success using their product, and in particular alongside a Venetrian package.

I'm currently exploring the various social networking options available to DNN (primarily group functionality coupled with user profiles).  Prime candidates were SmartSocial (free. nice but barely supported now), Active Social (nice, growing, but relatively expensive when renewals are factored in), and now VivoSocial (recently made free and open source).

It appears VivoSocial is essentially a full product suite, and may have the best features out-of-the-gate copared to their competitors.  It has a nice looking rating/rewards/commenting system, along with blogs/wikis.  However, reliability/usability is something I'm interested in, and I'm curious if others have had success making a functional site using that product.

In particular, my next DNN setup will likely focus primarily around the base DNN tools, a social networking suite, and Ventrians offerings (primarily the subscription tools and the property agent)... So, I'm interested in how the Ventrian couples with the VivoSocial package.

Example sites would be interesting to see.

Which part of the vivo demo is broken out of curiosity?  One thing I noticed is the "more categories" when clicked, renedered in a way where you couldn't scroll properly to see all the categories.

As far as some strengths go vs. the other companies, here's what I see:

1)  It's a good sign (usually) when one company acquires another company.  In this case it shows me that the product has legs, and will likely get attention from the developers.  SmartSocial is the opposite of this, and ActiveSocial also has this strength (continued development).

2) Features I like out the gate:

A) feature rich package in general.  Blogs, Wiki, events, all the normal grouping features, ratings, comments, points/rewards, custom profiles, some sort of forum posting, walls, tag clouds, messaging, categorization... the works.  This is extremely good by working at the group/site/individual levels.  I haven't been able to test it all yet, but it appears this works like this, so you can have group blogs, group forum posts, individual blogs, etc.

I want to see a bit more about the forums portion, but it may be a decent alternative to a traditional forum, while still taking advantage of the site wide cross categorizing.

B) There were some hidden features, that really have large scale potential beyond the normal usage.  For example:

  1) site wide rating/commenting/rewards and points.  That was a nice added feature beyond what one would expect from a "grouping" social network package.

  2) One of it's best features is it's cross categorization.  Without installing the package I can't comment too much here, but it really has some potential.  For example, it appears you can grab user blogs, group blogs, news, etc. all based on a category on one page.  So, for example, if you were in the cars category, you'd see feeds for group car blogs, individual car blogs, forum postings about cars, car news, etc. My description didn't do it justice, but cross promoting, cross categorization, etc. seem fairly extensive within the package.

  3) Another really powerful feature:  Users can comment/rate pretty much everything (while earning points/rewards).  Here's where the power comes in - you can rate feeds from other sites, rate users various postings, rate users themselves, and sort by rating.  It seems much more fluid with the modern web/social networking environment.  There are many uses for this, beyond what a typical social networking package can offer.

Keep in mind, that not all these features are implemented on the demo sight yet.  I'm not sure why, but hoping, it's because they simply haven't upgraded the demo site with the new features. (This is a relatively new version).

Weaknesses I'm concerned with:

1)  Just like you, I would like to see a cleaner demo site.  I don't like too many extra gizmos/javascript, and other things that get in the way of seeing the actual software.  For example, they have a javascript style tool bar that follows you as you scroll.  It's neat, but mostly just slows the page down.

2)  One other weakness I noticed, was it got a bit confusing where the results were coming from.  In other words, were the results internal news posts, blog posts, External RSS news, etc. - but that would be easy to fix.  If this gets cleaned up a bit, the cross categorizing would be even better.

Here's where I'm at so far, based on what I've seen, but not installed:

Honestly, I believe this is probably the best (features) suite I've seen to date for DNN (open source).  BTW, the open source licence is very beneficial to the end user, and the code is all available - both plusses.  This may be the largest collection of features in one package to date (especially free).  My favorite part of it is the integration of the many tools into one well meshed group.  SO, one download gets you a huge portion of your site - way beyond just the social networking/grouping portion that has typically been "hard" to acquire.

Ventrian was my previous best bang for your buck package (and is still a fantastic value).

The only thing I'm concerned with (and why I'm asking about it), is how well coded is it?  Will it break, is it non-usable in standard browsers like IE6 or later, etc.  Does it have some horrible caching issues that will bog the server way down?  Does some important part of it not work (like emailing).  Is there some other hidden deal breaker?

I also have to see exactly which features are/aren't included between the community (free) and paid versions.  I think it's just support, but possibly also some of the business features.  Not sure if that means business directory tools are or are not included in the free version.

If there aren't any substantial kinks, and if their forums are adequate, I'd say Ventrian for the PA, subscription and some other possible tools coupled with Vivo social, might be a quick, affordable, and actually very high quality solution for most types of public (and some intranet) DNN sites out there.  On first glance, it really appears that Vivo (plus Ventrian) can knock out a lot of the DNN needs in one bang (such as forums/blogs/wiki/groups/classifieds/messaging/RSS importing/categorization/searching) - without having to shop for a bunch of different modules.  And best of all, it's (Vivo) already fully integrated with each other.

Assuming it all works properly?

Edited - reposted below - the format was out-of-whack

In response to FM:

That's a good point, and something I generally agree with (and something to watch for with this product).  There are many examples of this.  In this particular case, I'm not so sure one way or the other, but I suspect the opposite...

I suspect there will be a lot more users of their product as the next year goes by.  They may provide a nice 3rd option to Active and SmartSocial, and may eventually lead in that category.  It would be nice to hear from folks who've used their product, but I gather there aren't a whole lot yet.  One of their biggest drawbacks, is many folks haven't even heard of them yet (when compared to Active/SmartSocial) - so it's difficult to learn from other users experiences.  They would be better of by promoting their product a bit.

Anyway, if anyone does wind up installing their product, it would be interesting to hear how it works out, and whether the code/package is viable.

gbrown:

That's a good point, and something I'll be weighing closely when I decide if I go in the Vivo direction or not.  That's one of my main goals as I'm gathering the tools for my next (very complex) web development.

I'm not sure about the PM tools, but I'm pretty sure the forum portion cannot do some things I would like a forum to be able to do.  Active Forums is definitely the leader in that area.  Blogs, news, etc. may have similar issues where another product may be a better at a given job.

However... their forums (and blogs, news, etc.) can do something Active (for example) may not be able to accomplish as a standalone worked into a typical DNN site with other modules.  One of Vivo's strengths is the cross categorization/cross searching functionality, which appears to mesh the forums/news/blogs/groups, etc. into one big data package that can easily share data amongst themselves - coupled with the already built in wrapper for rating, commenting, points, etc..  That's one of the things I'm most interested in.

So, I guess some good questions would be:

1) Can Vivo integrate well with other DNN modules like Active forums, Ventrian news, Ventrian messaging, etc.?

2)  Does it need to?  Is the sum of it's parts integrated together enough to essentially alleviate the need for some of the other third party "competing" modules like Active forums?

Best case scenario, I personally would really like to go with a mature forum tool like Active forums.  However, after looking at Vivo, I may go with a more "simple" (Vivo) forum application, but gain the strength of the integrated tools Vivo brings together with their forum.  I'm not really talking about blog, wiki, etc.  But more a forum tool that easily cross integrates into the blogs, wikis, groups, etc. and the other way around wrapped with a similar rating/commenting/profiles/points functionality throughout the product line.

I do know that you don't need to install all of the components - each is a separate module (or use of a module).  So, it may or may not be beneficial to use Active alongside Vivo depending on the end users needs.

If you ever get it up and running, please post back here so we can get an idea.  If their coding is sound, this is a fairly unique thing they're trying to do (as far as DNN modules go), and I'm interested how this plays out.

[quoteΣ) It's a good sign (usually) when one company acquires another company. In this case it shows me that the product has legs, and will likely get attention from the developers. [/quote]
If this is an important factor for you I would suggest doing some more homework on this "acquisition".

Active Social has been $399 since the first release. We do charge a higher price on Snowcovered because of the 25% fee. Venexus/VivoSocial was originally $499. Shortly after Active Social made it on to the top 10 list, Venexus dropped their price to $439. Exactly $10 less than the price on Snowcovered. Few weeks later they pull the product completely.

All that being said, we will be releasing a free version within the next couple of weeks.

Will: Thanks for the info.  Any comments are helping me (and others) make an informed decision.

The one good thing from this:  End users will have a variety of options, and features (at different pricepoints) as this all plays out.

Over time, I'm really excited to see what the different offerings come up with.

A best case scenario (for me anyway) would be to have Active's forums, and hierarchy (group/personal level events, forums, etc.), Ventrians subscription and Property Agent (and maybe news), and Vivo's cross categorizing social & news tools, rating/commenting/points, and possibly Vivo's general news/feeds/blogs/wikis tools.

I'm not sure which product I'd use for profiles.  It would likely depend on which (Active or Vivo) worked better with the other company's modules.  For example, I like Active's hierarchal setup for profiles. But I like Vivo's cross categorizing and points/comments/ratings for profiles.

If they work with each other, and if the price is right, that may be the direction I go with ultimately (a mix of all 3).

Here's some updates regarding Vivo.  These are observations to the best of my knowledge at this point, and definitely should not be taken as gospel.  I haven't installed it - these are my observations based on the demo, support site, documentation, and questions I've asked the company (and the answers I've received)...

1)  The more I dig, the more stable the company itself (and likely it's code) looks.  This is only an educated assumption.  I have no way to say how stable financially they are, nor whether they will be around in a few months.  However, they do have a professional product, professional documentation, a professional website, multiple support/developer bodies, a business model similar to DNN, and a large suite of products built to work together or as separate pieces. 

2) Shortly after the open source announcement was made (accompanied by a new version), a new release update came out.  Looking at their support (codeplex) area, you can see issues being worked on, fixed, and new enhancements being considered.

3) I have been given satisfactory answers to any questions I have come up with to this point (including "how to" answers, and product capability answers, etc.).  Again, that shows me that this is not going toward an abandoned product.  Additionally, they showed me where to make feature requests, etc., which is also not the sign of an abandoned product.

4) To my surprise, Vivo has added some very thorough documentation to their site.  They have a manual essentially for each of their modules, coupled with video tutorials, step-by-step guides for setting up different variations on their products, etc.  One manual (amongst 10+ manuals) alone was over 40 pages with screen shots, etc..  Again, this lends itself to a quality suite of products.

So, essentially my concerns whether the code/company will be of high quality with continued support have been answered.  I'm coming from the outside in (being relatively new to DNN as a whole), in search of specific tools to fill a rather complex/large network.  So these are my observations without longterm knowledge of the code or company development of Venexus, Vivo, etc.  This doesn't mean Vivo is the solution to all life's woes as I may make it sound.  However, this is a sum of what research I've done to this point.  The essense of it all is this:  I'm finding the Vivo offering to be a suprisingly strong product vs. the amount I've heard about it publicly.  A bit of a diamond in the rough.

Okay, now that that's been mentioned, here's something regarding the product itself that ventrian users can relate to.

One of Ventrians biggest advantages (beyond solidly coded products, and timely/accurate support) is the utility of it's individual products.  For example, PA seems to have been intentionally developed with a wide variety of uses in mind (anything from a simple directory to a property agent to a classifieds to the beginnings of an ecommerce setup when coupled with subscription tools).  It was built with utility in it's nature.

Vivo seems to have been developed in a similar fashion.  Here's an example of what I mean.  I was inquiring about group level, and personal level blogs/events, etc.  So you could isolate a specific users events and make them private, etc.  Rather than creating just one tool for a private event for personal, and one for group level events, they made a wider range of tools that can be shaped into that usage, amongst many other uses.  In other words there is a ton of flexibility in how you implement Vivo's products into your suite, rather than boxing you into a few "standard" uses.  Both solutions are great.  But the broader usage aspect (like Ventrian) opens the doors to a lot more options for site developers.  Lotsa versatility.

Lastly, it appears that a "tiered" hierarchy (such as Active Social has), is doable with Vivo's existing modules.  So, personal blogs, events, news and group blogs, events, news, and site wide events, blogs, news are all doable on the same site.  (That's one of the big attractions of ActiveSocial for my use).  Yet at the same time, you retain the site wide cross categorization capability (so group level blogs/events can be intermingled with site wide blogs/events, etc. or not - depending on your needs).

Anyway, lots more to check out, but so far a pleasant suprise.

No problem...

Most of their documentation (pdf's and vids) are in their forums by module/topic, requiring download - pretty easy to find. ***BUT YOU MUST BE LOGGED IN TO SEE THEM.

They also have a breakdown of each module in a wiki format directly on their site, but it's hard to find.  I think I originally found it by googling or site search for vivo+wiki.

One thing I noticed when navigating their site.  Once you register, you can see a few more navigation options (such as the documentation downloads, etc.).

As original founder and owner of Venexus and now Chief Software Architect of VivoWare, I thought I would clarify any “speculation”. Before I go into this lengthy post, I want to note that I am not here to advertise our products, but happened to come across this thread and decided that I needed to step in and answer a lot of questions. I am also not here to offend anyone and have the utmost respect for Scott and Ventrain Systems and all of the other DNN gurus I have had the pleasure of meeting in the past 5 years. I would like to also point out that Venexus and VivoWare have done poor job advertising and marketing their offering. Both have refrained from monitoring other websites, including this one and the DNN forums; simply because we have been too busy coding. However, I think it is important to discuss any associations that I have. So here goes:

1.    I have discussed via email with Scott several times about certain features and modules from Ventrian. He has always provided great support. We have recommended Property Agent, Photo Galley, and many other modules to our clients in the past. At one time, Venexus paid Ventrian for some features in Property Agent several years ago, and of course they always worked. Always great stuff and support.

2.     I have never spoken to Rodney with Smart Thinker, but do know he has been in the DNN community for quite some time.  I do know he went open source with his modules, but I know nothing about the features or capabilities. His stuff looks very cool, but I cannot comment on what it can and cannot do.

3.    I have met Will from Active Modules, first in Vega in 2006 and again in 2007. He is a great guy and we had a lot of fun nights on the town (No more to be said!). As for his products, we have used and recommended Active Forums from at least sometime in 2006. We were even using Active Forums on the Venexus website for our support forums until the VivoWare acquisition. We (VivoWare) still have many clients using Active Forums and still recommend it, depending on the requirements. Also, at one time we were using and recommending Active Purchase and Active CRM.  I know very little about what Active Social can and cannot do, and will leave Will to answer any of that.

With that out of the way, let me give a little history. Venexus was started back in 2004, by one other business partner besides me. Venexus became a “DotNetNuke shop” in 2005 with the DNN 3 release. Our first DNN clients were in the financial industry. Several of those clients are still clients today, including one DNN site that provides a 30 year old daily government bond index. We made good money doing custom DNN modules for these clients and began to grow as a company. We picked up more custom module projects for several government and education industry clients, which we really learned to refine our development processes. With a one time high of 10 employees, we were the largest strictly DotNetNuke development shop around.

Search has been a hobby of mine for 9 years now. Here is a post from 2006 giving some history of the pre DNN version of search to DNN (http://dnnblog.venexus.com/And+Then+There+Was+SearchPart+I.aspx ). Truly ancient stuff! In January 2007, Venexus released its first commercial DNN module offering for a Search Engine, which is still the same Search and Seamus modules of today.  After this, we would be asked constantly if we could build a social network like My Space, then when Facebook got hot, they wanted one like that. Oh, and the budget to build one of these would be $3000. We would laugh, and say no way, it would cost tens of thousands, maybe 100’s of thousands of dollars to replicate all of this functionality. After all, these MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, most popular social network flavor of the week sites are selling for many millions a pop for a reason, right? It just can’t be done with a 3k budget, is all we knew. But, more people kept asking how much to build it.

In June 2007, we announced social bookmarks and the first implementation of DotNetNuke and social search. Also in mid 2007, we got a news industry client that financed the development of combining article submission to our search engine. While we loved what Ventrian offered with their Articles module, it did not have any integration with our search modules, and for that project, it just made sense to make our own module. It was an incredibly complex process with writer/editor permissions all based on Categories, but is what brought Categories, IndexItem, Search Directory and Moderation modules to fruition. Also during this time, we quietly began building our own Profile module (ProfileSearch) to display profiles associated to the Article submissions. At that time, it was just Smart Thinker UserProfiles and DNN Fusion MyProfile available to my knowledge. I am not sure when Active Profile (pre-Active Module acquisition of DNN Fusion and pre-Active Social) came out, Will can clarify that. Regardless, we decided to do our own implementation of how profiles should work and looked at Facebook’s design for Profiles and Groups for the basis of our look and feel.

We found a client that would finance us to finish our ProfileSearch module in late 2007. As part of the research, we went to Mashable.com and pulled up every single social network site that was linked from that site (40+ at that time) and explored all of the functionality. We took the best features of all of them and began adding tasks to our issue tracker to develop it in our DNN modules. We had the first working example on January 2008. We began offering the profile search module to our existing clients in February.

We continued to refine our Profile module and sell it to our existing clients. We learned a lot from how Ventrian handled the templates for PropertyAgent and designed our template structure very similar to how Scott did it. We learned how to make the modules flexible and allow our clients to create their own very unique social network designs without interfering with the module updates. Our module templates became robust. We continued to add new features that made our modules unique to any others that existed. We added module settings for everything allowing you to enable and disable features and integrate with our other modules. We made our Web Controls all Web Services based and even created Dynamic Controls ability to allow our clients or us to build their own custom user controls to be embedded in Profile Search. With many developers contributing code to our suite and there being so many different possibilities to configure our modules, I personally find new features that I did not know existed all of the time. Most importantly, we learned that we could easily “sell” custom development of these social networking modules.

Since search engines are my hobby, I decided to find a new domain to build my own personal search engine. With the idea of a “social search engine”, on May 2, 2008 I bought ImVivo.com. “Vivo” in Italian means “alive”, so “I’m Alive!” was the idea behind having a social network to let users decide which search results would “live” or “die”. I liked the domain so much, that I purchased VivoWare.com on May 14, 2008 with the idea of a new company that would focus on just building social search engines and social networks. But, Venexus used I’m Vivo for showcasing how a social network could be used and with over 2 million records in the database; it made a very good test case. Since VivoWare was just an idea at that point, it just sat there for quite some time.

Active Modules announced they acquired DNN Fusion on May 28^, 2008, I believe. In early June, 2008 was the last time I have spoken with Will and when he found out we were about to sell our social networking modules, he said “I guess we are competitors now”. I agreed. He already had the Forums, CRM, and ecommerce modules, but we certainly would have to compete with the Profiles. After all, a little competition is good for innovation, right?

In our source control, we had about 50 “Venexus” modules. We decided to take about 20 of these modules, including our profiles, groups, messages, search, directory, etc., and offer them as a subscription. Venexus began selling social modules directly through the Venexus site in June 2008, then on SnowCovered around July or August for $499 as a license and 1 year subscription to 20+ DNN modules. Even though we had 20+ modules in our offering, we constantly had complaints that the price was too high and they only wanted to buy the Search modules, or the Profile modules, or whatever. So we created other packages. We created a Profile Package (5 modules), Business Package (3 modules), and all sort of other silly packages for a variety of prices. We played with the pricing to see how it would affect sales, going down to $479, then to $439. Everyone wanted the source code and it was not an option.

Despite all of this, what we found was that even doing advertising to sell these modules, providing custom implementations was where the money was at. Even at a high when Venexus was doing advertising for the packages, it only accounted for 10% of the best selling month’s revenue. Not to mention, SnowCovered got 25% of the money on any of these packages, and then we still had to provide a “professional” level of support. Since we have been developing all of these features for custom development projects for our clients, we were having to support the complexity of what our modules could do and with that came a lot of questions and people trying different things with our modules that we had never even envisioned. We also had to support DNN 4 and DNN 5 version of our modules, which really became a pain in the arse. At the end of the day, it seemed to cost us more to sell these small module packages and maintain the support of different DNN flavors and all the crazy things you developers/designers decide to do with the modules.

By August 2008, we had discussed and had a vision for VivoWare. We would do things a little different with VivoWare as far as how the company was structured, by giving everyone an equal ownership of the company. In September 2008, we quietly launched the VivoWare website, focusing on “social enterprise search”, basically selling a custom installation and configuration of Venexus modules.

Of all of the custom development we were doing for Venexus and VivoWare, the custom social networking development seemed to be the most popular. By the beginning of 2009, we were getting some interesting social networking projects and began to really focus on developing custom social networks for our clients. These client funded projects would get released as updates for our Software Collection subscription, making our product better and better, but giving the benefit to our existing clients any new bug fixes and features.

In April 2009, Venexus landed a deal to build a social network for a Microsoft funded project. This project really let us hone some of the features of our social networking. And, we got to see firsthand what heavy use of our modules was like and tweak them even more.

By June of last year, we decided that it was time to focus heavily on VivoWare and begin phasing out Venexus by the end of the year.  This would allow us to completely change our brand and marketing, while focusing on what we enjoyed the most, which was social network development. What we could do with our modules could surpass any competitor in the custom social network software industry and I am not referring to the DNN community, but rather companies that focus on building social networks. Just do a search for “social networking software” on Google and you will see many competitors in the market.

We began telling our custom development clients of this coming change in August. In September Venexus announced that it would no longer support DNN 4 version of its modules. We worked hard on perfecting the VivoWare site and then in October, it hit me. We were about to go about this all wrong. Here we were, a company selling social networking software, and we really were not “social”. Our own site did not allow for commenting, voting, and rating. We did not have everything setup to allow client interaction

 In November and December, we began changing the VivoWare site to make it “social”. And to make it all official, on December 21^st we announced that VivoWare acquired Venexus. On January 1, 2010, Venexus ceased operations and VivoWare became the new owners of all software and development. On January 13^th, VivoWare released the 6.0 version of Venexus modules. Our source code was still proprietary. But why? If we were going to go all out, we should do it right. We quietly released version 7 of VivoSocial and the VivoWare version of our modules on January 29^th.

On February 1 we announced that we were going open source with our modules AND provide an entire DNN installation, with our modules already installed, configured, and ready to go. On February 3, we announced we had uploaded all source to CodePlex at social.codeplex.com. On February 8, version 7.0.1 was released. On February 17, version 7.0.2 was released. And, by Monday version 7.0.3 will be released. Why open source and give it all away for free? The reason is simple. We have never made any real money selling modules on our site or from SnowCovered with their 25% commission fee. However, most of our revenue has always been from customizations and support. So, by giving away our modules, we will have put our code in more hands than ever before, and with that comes request for more customizations and paid support. We also get the benefit of other people contributing source code to the project, which has already been done. It’s that simple.

We are also offering 2 other versions besides the Community Edition. The Enterprise Edition does have more features, including an Ad Management system and integration with Catalook and the Elite version provides all of the features of the Enterprise Edition, plus custom installation, configuration, look and feel, and support.  And, we have support packages for those who need urgent support or custom needs.

In conclusion, we are not going anywhere. The name and game has changed but we are now focusing on what we do best. We are completely open to new ideas and integration with 3^rd party modules and you can submit any request to our support site at http://support.vivoware.com. I am all game for playing well with others, so if Scott, Rodney, or Will would like to discuss any integration, I am available.

I hope that clears up some questions and if you have any more, don’t hesitate to ask!

Well done, Jeff! This is definitely the longest post I've read in the Ventrian forums and you're words-per-post average (if those kinds of statistics are available anywhere) has got to be waaaaaay up there!

I just installed the VivoWare modules on my personal site last night and I'm looking forward to trying them out soon. If you guys (you, Scott, Rodney, Will) can get together and integrate your stuff, there will be some amazing things come out of it.

Awesome!  Thank you for posting the detailed information Jeff.