Here is a quick status report on progress on iMIS Community.

First, some statistics.

As of May 25, 2006:
There were 163 registered users on iMIS Community. That's about 100 ASIers and 60 partners and customers. I estimate 100 users are active.

There were 345 articles published with 745 comments on the articles.

History graphs are based on data recorded by the node, user and comment modules. They show statistics from the day the first node, user or comment was created, until today.

Number of nodes (articles).

Number of users.

Number of comments.

Major features of iMIS Community

• Wiki
• Forums and issue discussion
• Knowledge blogging
• Project betas and issue tracking

The major activities include:
ASI centric project activities:

• design discussions – project features, design approaches, debate on implementation approaches, etc.
• project communications and weekly/daily reporting – “management community” style reporting on objectives and progress
• Internal best practices

Wiki knowledge base

• Beginning to publish APIs, such as iBO for .NET API
• Will be the realization of “DevNet”

Betas and Emerging Technology Previews

• iBO for .NET – A very successful beta program, supporting the module and several customer and partner projects such as Alt e-series, PF, ISG, and others
• LDAP for iMIS – Directory service that allows iMIS databases to be searched in outlook and other mail programs

Product Support

• Analytics updates and new usages
• Product suggestions

Observations to date
We are getting some outstanding contributions we have never seen before. Examples come from a number of people including Beau, John Mann, Jay and many others in which these and other contribute to many topics they are knowledgeable about, give their knowledge outright and contribute to other global product needs and issues.
The “open/transparent” approach has allowed us to put a number of projects back on track before any significant amount of time had transpired.

The open approach has facilitated communication of direction that apparently only a couple of people were hearing in the past to much broader groups.

The central knowledge/wiki is going to be invaluable.

The outside beta participation has been outstanding. We are getting literally hundreds if not thousands of high quality hours on our beta projects, coming back with feature needs and bug reports. Our responsiveness has been very good. iBO for .NET, should go out bug free and better suited to the needs than anything we have done like this before.
The worldwide participation has been very high quality.

Next steps
I consider the following the most valuable next steps for iMIS Community

• Build consulting library in iMIS Community. Consulting has said they are ready to do this.
• Continue building out the “DevNet” concept. Standards and standard practices, module designs, etc.
• Continue to publish the iMIS API and “how to build an iMIS module like ASI does” to enable consulting and partners to build higher quality, ready to go non-core add-ons to iMIS.