Most times it is best to talk about the elephant in the room because we can all see it, even if we wish it weren't there. In our case we'll call out the elephant with the question: Why doesn't Livelink-Experts.com use Open Text's Livelink to host the community? The answer is simple, it is the wrong tool for the job, however that isn't a very informative answer so I'll elaborate.
There are many features and functions within Livelink-Experts.com that would be a perfect match to Livelink's capabilities but there are a few that are, if not impossible, certainly difficult and contrary to much of the philosophy of Livelink. At the base, Livelink-Experts.com is built from a content management system (CMS) and there isn't a better CMS than Livelink! It has a proven architecture that is relatively secure, very robust, and scalable probably to as many as 1 billion objects or more (though that remains mainly theoretical); when the solution fits, no application can hold a candle to Livelink. That being said, much of the security and scalability comes from a desktop-centric paradigm as befits the business of the previous 20 years and remains well entrenched in the large businesses of today.
Livelink-Experts.com is an Online Community
Our paradigm is not one of supporting desktop users, rather in supporting web users. Open Text's Livelink's primary use-case is one of the management of external objects (most often documents) using Livelink as a very well managed repository using a web browser and web protocols to move these external objects to and from the user's desktop environment. From there the real work horses would take over, primarily Microsoft's Office suite; most Livelink users, even the so-called 'power-users' spend far more time with something other than Livelink in order to generate the content destined for Livelink.
There are exceptions of course, being a Turing Machine itself, Livelink can handle any problem, but it was originally designed and is specifically tuned for dealing with discreet, externally created, self-contained digital data (also known as files). But Livelink-Experts.com isn't intended as a place to store and manage documents, it is a place to discuss Livelink, to find experts in Livelink, and to provide a community that is both Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer where the common factor for both Business and Consumer is Livelink.
A B2B community is actually right up Livelink's alley, certainly once the initial communications are over and some sort of B2B transaction seems likely, discreet documents are the only appropriate technology to use ... thus does Livelink provide the ideal environment for such collaboration. But it falls short when we add Consumers to the equation because of some early and rigid design choices regarding security. In short, while there are workarounds that have been available and used for years, Livelink is very much married to the notion of a named user which makes working with web-based consumers somewhat problematic.
Livelink's Security is Too Finely Grained for Livelink-Experts.com
It's not that we don't appreciate security, far from it! It's just that our security paradigm is so much different. We desire strong role-based security, where access to features, functions, and data are decided upon the specfiic role(s) that a user holds at the time of the request. Livelink was created and embraces a user/group permission model for most aspects, and something like role-based security for Livelink Projects (with Coordinators, Members, and Guests). Frankly, a role-based security model can easily be created from a user/group model (by simply making high-level groups be the roles) but it takes a very disciplined use of Livelink to use roles in this way because the users and groups making up the "roles" are always visible and available.
Where Livelink takes the reasonable and, where Records Management is involved, necessary view that every document requires it's own Access Control List, Livelink-Experts.com recognizes that a separate ACL per object is the exception rather than the rule and the price of those ACLs is just too high.But more than that, Livelink-Experts.com requires a flexible permission system that works with features and functions, not just "nine levels of access" based around read/write/delete concepts. but (for instance) the ability to determine who can adjust the privacy settings for a particular field within a form ... for instance, allowing certain roles to hide their birthday from being seen from within their profile or to allow certain roles the ability to opt-out of Google analytics and other tracking devices.
There are many differences between Livelink and Drupal (the CMS Livelink-Experts.com is built upon) but one of the most striking is the permissioning system ...Livelink's is very rigid and inflexible, Drupal's is highly customizable and flexible but somewhat haphazard.
Livelink's Proven Scalability Not Applicable to Livelink-Experts.com
As Livelink Experts ourselves, we know that Livelink is a highly scalable CMS with many hundreds, perhaps thousands of deployments with larger user bases and far greater volumes of data than Livelink-Experts.com will likely acquire for many years, however as good and real as that scalability is, it does not apply to everything that Livelink does. This comes back to the basic paradigm of Livelink, as a document-based CMS...it does that better than any but while it has Forums/Discussion, "blogs", "wikis", and most of the supposed Web 2.0 tools, they are clunky and a bit convoluted because they are built on top of the very rigid security paradigm of Livelink.
As an online community, Livelink-Experts.com is most interested in discussions, blogs; in sharing stories and expertise; in the informal communication that makes social media so powerful. Any added security to that paradigm only unnecessarily adds to the performance cost. It isn't yet clear that Drupal is capable of truly large scale deployments of such Web 2.0 work either, but Livelink certainly could not be expected to do better.
No Real Consumer Orientation
Again, as a Turing Machine Livelink can be made into anything but it was built as an Intranet and holds fairly close to the concept that all users within a single deployment are related in some sense ... while the original intent of "all users are members of the same company" has been loosened, it remains the case that much of the features and functions of Livelink are tuned to support a single business. Much of the power of Livelink-Experts.com, however, is the ability to support a number of distinct, diverse and different people and companies as befits a community. There exists a common interest, in Livelink, but no common relationship.
Livelink-Experts.com also strongly supports the anonymous visitor .. a true consumer of information and goods; the consumer is supported with an e-commerce solution and an online ad supplier and the business is supported by providing the ability to present content in any fashion they choose, not necessarily the fashion Livelink chooses.
Cost is the Real Killer
As we are run by the Global Alliance of Trusted Experts, you can trust that we will speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Truth here is that the cost of Livelink, both in terns of the license cost as well as deployment costs, are far too large to support an online community like Livelink-Experts.com. Whether we look at the Open Text per-user license model or the vast development costs that would be required to support Livelink-Experts.com, or whether we look at the cost of Oracle and/or SQL licenses to support Livelink ... cost is the Achilles Heal of Livelink. It would simply not be feasible to run such a community from Livelink unless these costs can be absorbed somewhere else (as in Open Text's own case where "http://communities.opentext.com" is part of the marketing department and, of course, Livelink licenses are free).
Should Livelink-Experts.com grow to 100s of thousands of users and/or to millions of objects or Terabytes of data, then the power of Livelink would be required, we trust that that day will come! ... we are aware of what happens to Drupal when these sorts of numbers are reached.... but to use Livelink today would undoubtedly be the death of Livelink-Experts.com.