Summary
citrite.org is an unofficial community initiated by Sam Johnston in 2005 to foster communication between Citrix Employees ('Citrites') and the Citrix community in general (including clients, partners, etc).
Company information
"Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS) is the global leader and the most trusted name in application delivery infrastructure. More than 200,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to deliver any application to users anywhere with the best performance, highest security and lowest cost. Citrix customers include 100% of the Fortune 100 companies and 98% of the Fortune Global 500, as well as hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers. Citrix has approximately 6,200 channel and alliance partners in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2006 was $1.1 billion."
Sam Johnston (Global Escalation Engineer, Dublin, Ireland) developed, hosted and contributed to the site while an employee of Citrix and continues to maintain the site as CTO of Revevol.
Case description
Having identified an opportunity to break down the barriers between Citrix and its community (partners, clients, potential employees, etc.) the citrite.org domain was privately registered on 19 July 2005, though it wasn't until over a year later (21 August 2006) that Citrix CEO Mark Templeton facilitated the launch of its first service 'Citrites' Blogs' through introduction of the Citrix Blogging Policy. In order to encourage participation free citrite.org blogs were offered to all employees and alumni in time for the announcement.
The service was extremely popular with around 50 blogs created (mostly from Citrix Technical Support where it was widely advertised) and 5,000 visitors generating 30,000 hits in the first month of operation. New services, enhancements and incentives were progressively introduced over the following months, including:
- Citrites' Blogs - free Wordpress blogs for Citrix employees & alumni (Wordpress MU)
- Citrites' Feeds - aggregated feeds for Citrites' Blogs and other Citrix related content (Gregarius/Planet)
- Citrites' Tools - a database of useful tools for Citrix employees, customers and partners (Drupal)
- FeedBurner Feeds - enhanced feeds and reader statistics
- September Blogging Competition - Amazon voucher for the author of a randomly selected blog post (won by Dave Gallinson)
- OpenID support - initially for blog comments
- Creative Commons licensing of content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license.
- Citrix Live Timeline - DHTML based timeline for visualising milestones in Citrix's history
- @citrite.org email - gmail accounts for Citrix employees & alumni
- LinkedIn Group - Citrites group for social networking between Citrix employees & alumni
- Inclusion of Citrix Technology Professionals (CTPs)
A separate but related site ('Citrites' Search') was launched on 31 October 2006 using Google Custom Search and Google AJAX Search API to provide a powerful, performant search across many Citrix related sites (including citrix.com and citrite.org).
The citripedia.org Citrix Encyclopedia wiki (based on MediaWiki) was also quietly launched on 4 December 2006 but it was never seeded with content beyond a skeleton structure.
Enterprise 2.0 solution
- Google Apps for gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Start Page
- Drupal 4.6 for Content Management System (CMS) (citrite.org)
- WordPress MU for multi-user blogging
- LinkedIn Groups for the Social Network Service (SNS)
- Gregarius for feed aggregation (subsequently considered Planet)
- FeedBurner for feed enhancement and monitoring (API also considered for automated provisioning by Wordpress MU)
- OpenID for authentication
- MediaWiki for Citripedia Citrix Encyclopedia
- SIMILE Timeline for Citrix Live Timeline
- LAMP Architecture (Debian GNU/Linux server operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP scripting language)
- DeamHost for hosting
- Creative Commons for licensing
Results / Benefits
The project had an immediate effect on Citrix's perception within the community, with articles written including:
- Citrix Is Changing It’s Attitude Towards The Community
- Citrix Starts Blogging
- Current and Former Citrix Employees Blog at Citrite.org
- Citrix Employees on the blog \o/
- Citrix “bloggt”!
It also played an important role in the establishment of the official CitrixCommunity.com site, spearheaded by Citrix CTO Rick Braddy:
This site was founded by a small group of Citrix employees as a place for topic-based blogging to take place. It’s founders include Kurt Moody, Dave Asprey, Sam Johnston and Rick Braddy.
This site is also syndicated with Citrite.org, a site founded by Sam Johnston for individual Citrix employee blogs. In case you were wondering, a “Citrite” is another name for Citrix employee. Citrites are very passionate about what they do, as you’ll see from our postings.
Through this site, you can participate in conversations taking place between Citrix employees and the Citrix community - customers, partners and active industry members of all kinds.
Hurdles / Challenges
- Reliable, affordable hosting for a shoestring-budget project is difficult. DreamHost have been very good with 99.468% uptime for 2007 YTD.
- Multi-product installations require substantial integration effort despite the availability of lightweight APIs.
- Security is very important and yet difficult to maintain in a multi-product installation and backups were difficult and time consuming until automated.
- Political issues will affect any unofficial project (even with top level management visibility and support) and need to be monitored and mitigated. For example:
- On 22 September 2006 David Daugherty and Michael Berg (Citrix Web Marketing) 'stumbled across (my) website' and were 'trying to get a handle on all the Citrix-related websites out there' and then on 22 November 2006 they were 'still trying to get all our Citrix-related domains managed under one registrar, Register.com'. I declined on the basis that I'm 'reasonably happy with this arrangement, particularly as I'm doing some fairly advanced things with DNS'.
- On 12 December 2006 Sasha Siegel (Citrix IP Counsel) wrote to 'insist that (I) transfer ownership of the citrite.org domain name to Citrix' on the basis that it infringed the 'CITRITE' trademark. According to USPTO no such trademark ever existed but the site was nonetheless scrubbed of other marks as a precaution.
- On 22 December 2006 Julio Rodriguez (Citrix SMART Manager) instructed Dmitry Vostokov (Citrix Dev Analysis) to migrate immediately to another blog host without any justification. Content was subsequently restored and is now static.
Lessons learned
- Web 2.0 APIs allow for relatively painless integration of disparate products with little risk of failure with changes to components.
- Open Source Software allows for modifications to be made as and where necessary.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based solutions are preferable over traditional software.
- SaaS Suites like Google Apps are likely to dominate this market for ease of use alone.
- Content is (still) king when it comes to information based sites like citripedia.org - be sure to seed your sites with appropriate content.
Screenshots
Information about the case
Author
Sam Johnston <samj@samj.net>, CTO, Microcost
Disclosures
- Global Escalation Engineer at Citrix Systems, Inc. during development of citrite.org
- Subsequently CTO of Microcost (Citrix Partner)
