Sazbean

Community Server by Telligent powers some large communities for NFL, National Geographic Magazine Online, Intel, Microsoft Game Studios, Mazda MX-5, and MySpace forums, among others. Community Server touts ease-of-use and has a community of its own with a documentation wiki and support forum. The software is powered by .NET, which can be downloaded and installed or hosted by Telligent. Standard community fare comes out-of-the-box: blogs, forums, profiles, private messaging, photos and files. Functionality and capabilities can be extended through add-ins and customizations (capabilities list). There is support for single sign-in with your website and analytics through Web Trends or Google Analytics (possibly other tag-based packages).

Three packages offer different included functionality and pricing (full list of features). Additional licenses can be purchased to extend the number of most of these functions.

Professional:

• $2000 + $500/year support
• Supports approximately 1 million page views per month and 25,000 members per server
• 2 websites
• 100 blogs
• 100 forums
• 200 photo galleries
• 1,000 shared files
• Unlimited content mirroring (displaying content on the community through RSS feeds)

Enterprise:

• Contact for cost, support included
• Supports approximiately 10 million page views per month and 100,000 members per server
• 3 websites
• Unlimited blogs, forums, shared files, photo galleries and content mirroring
• Enterprise email integration (to allow users to send and reply to messages on forums and blogs)
• Distributed jobs to support high traffic sites

Hosted:

• Starts at $199/mo for up to 250,000 page views per month, additional at $0.009 per page view
• Includes everything but add-ons
• 25 blogs
• 25 forums
• 500 shared files
• 50 photo galleries
• 100 content mirrors

I like the community aspect Telligent has created for support of their software, but I personally would not want to support a .NET application, even hosted (personal preference). There also does not seem to be any out-of-the-box functionality to integrate the community content into your website (although you can integrate content from your site into the community through an RSS feed). The Hosted and Professional packages are close in first-year price, with Professional offering more of everything, but also requiring you to install and host the community. The Hosted package is a very good deal for a business looking to start a social network without much cost, as long as you’re not looking to integrate the community content into your own website.

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