When I think of social business software, I think of all the ways that collaborating can improve a business and give it a leg over the competition. Perhaps the simplest is the age-old suggestion box, brought into the next generation.
Ideas in ConcourseConnect is a glorified suggestion box, with a twist. When a suggestion is made, other employees have the opportunity to express an opinion. It's the cumulative rating and review process that helps an idea get fleshed out and adopted. The community effect can quickly squash a mediocre suggestion, but also draw attention to the most important ones.
To improve the Ideas module, we learned from our recent development of Challenges. Read on for a screen shot and a link to see Ideas in action.
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Challenges is a new module from Concursive that helps drive users to your community in an interesting and unique way. The premise is that users suggest various challenges, with the most popular suggestions being activated. The Challenge of the Day may take several days to accomplish, and users indicate when they've met the goals of the challenge.
Some example challenges might be:
- Walk 3 miles today
- Take a picture with your boss
- Meet a sales objective
You can try out Challenges here:
http://social.preview.concursive.com/challenges.shtml
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In this week's update to ConcourseConnect (available for ConcourseCloud.com and Enterprise customers), we have rolled out a personalized Assignments page and have made the Task module a standard configuration for newly created Projects.
Read on for screenshots and more information.
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ConcourseConnect 3.0 is taking shape and includes features like Importing Users, a Photo Gallery, Streamlined Invitations, 3rd party client API for mobile clients, UI improvements and a video module for the final release. Concursive has done some integrations that users can try in the early access version, like OpenMeetings support.
ConcourseConnect 3.0 is in active development. Concursive customers receive early access to ConcourseConnect 3.0. Once the release has been finalized, the binary and source will be available for download. The commercial versions of our products include the ConcourseConnect Management plug-in which allows ConcourseConnect user data to be visualized in ConcourseSuite and for ConcourseSuite to be able to market to ConcourseConnect users. Another option we have is a tools plug-in for enabling groups in ConcourseConnect to have their own CRM tools.
If you are interested in the latest commercial versions of ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite, please contact us so we can get in touch with you. Customers can switch to CC 3.0 and CS 6.1 by following our upgrade procedure (backup everything, then the new versions will auto-upgrade the database). There might be some fine tuning of preferences afterwards, but that's it.
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Today is an important milestone for ConcourseConnect. ConcourseConnect 2.0 has been in development for over a year and has had early-access releases to customers, partners, and enthusiasts – now that code is available to everyone! ConcourseConnect 2.0 uses the AGPL3 Open Source license.
ConcourseConnect 2.0 has over 40 major improvements, and hundreds of smaller improvements.
(Direct Download Link – 36.3 MB)
Concursive is also announcing that an early release of ConcourseConnect 3.0 is now available to customers – contact us to get the latest version.
ConcourseConnect 2.0
Latest Release |
ConcourseConnect 3.0
Early Access
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- Activity Streams
- Email Updates
- Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo
- Ustream, Livestream, Justin.tv, Qik
- Ideation
- Follow/Subscribe
- Community Management Plug-in
- Content Management
- Wiki
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All the features of 2.0 plus...
- Mobile
- Advanced Discussion Forum
- Photo Gallery
- Two-way Video
- Enhanced User Registration
- Importing Users
- WSRP Portlets
and more.
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The majority of Concursive's supported installations are Enterprise 2.0 installations that run on a company's intranet. These installations are members-only sites that have further customizations and graphic design that integrate with the enterprise and increase adoption.
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In a previous blog, I proclaimed my excitement for Enterprise 2.0 and introduced the story behind Concursive's approach. As I mentioned, I'll now compare ConcourseConnect to Jive SBS.
Concursive's ConcourseConnect enables organizations to create dynamic communities and involve various stakeholders in a collaborative environment. ConcourseConnect is developed by the Concursive Corporation, and Concursive's products are used by large enterprises and thousands of small businesses alike. As Chief Architect of ConcourseConnect, I have intimate knowledge of how it works. I spend a lot of time researching collaboration and over the years I have played a role in designing, deploying and on-boarding various community building tools. So let me tell you about ConcourseConnect and how it compares to the competition.
The first product I want to compare it to is Jive SBS. Jive SBS made a splash in 2009 with the release of its SBS brand. Jive Software is also a private company with thousands of customers. Personally, as an avid user around Jive's social business software, including Clearspace and SBS, I can explain some of the nuances between Jive and ConcourseConnect. I can't be completely objective, but I can provide specific examples to back up my thoughts. I have been a consultant to Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies using Jive so I have a sense of how large enterprises use it. I have also helped companies migrate off of Jive onto ConcourseConnect and other platforms. The Jive installations that I have seen use community tools like pictures, videos, blogs, documents, and mostly discussion forums.
At a high-level, Connect and Jive both deliver many important elements of Enterprise 2.0, namely blogs, wikis, documents, activity streams and user empowerment. In fact, on the surface the tools are very similar out-of-the-box. Other features similar to both products include: public and private groups, discussion forums, document management capabilities, bookmarks and lists, project management, rich user profiles, searching, customization and ideation (added in ConcourseConnect 1.0 and announced for Jive SBS and soon available).
Instead of focusing on discrete features and putting checkmarks next to names, I've boiled the topics down to something I feel is much more important: How well does the application work?
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I just read Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee and when a smart guy tells you, "healthy and valuable online environments are likely to result when using emergent social software platforms," your organization should heed his advice because he's seen it work over and over again. In fact, he coined the term Enterprise 2.0. If there's any doubt, just read his book. There's much to digest, so let me get to the point, as Andrew McAfee says, "Enterprise 2.0 is ultimately the result of a large number of individual choices about which technologies to use for communication, collaboration, and interaction."
So what Concursive did is put their heads together many years ago with some of the minds in the industry who care about collaboration and social networking to deliver something that ensures that a core social networking platform will keep advancing in ways that no single company can. Concursive open sourced years worth of work and has already seen the vision of sharing this platform come to fruition. So, while Concursive's ConcourseConnect doesn't do everything that every other social networking platform does, it does the important stuff well, it advances in many areas, and it innovates in others… ultimately you have a choice, and you can tailor and adapt the platform to your needs, as many other companies have already done today.
Once your organization has made the leap to learn more about using online collaboration, you ought to become familiar with the realities of available collaboration software. So in the next part in this blog series I'll describe the benefits of using ConcourseConnect and begin to compare ConcourseConnect with other workplace solutions. Based on Dion Hinchcliffe's Map of the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Marketplace I've chosen to use a product from Jive Software, called Jive SBS, as the basis of my comparison. Jive SBS is among a number of companies in which Dion has categorized in the 'Enterprise 2.0 Sweet Spot.'
Stay tuned for the upcoming review.
Update: The comparison between Jive SBS and ConcourseConnect has been posted.
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What makes Facebook and Twitter so useful? I believe it's the capability to easily jot down tidbits of information and for curious others to see, interpret and act on what was written. So, if you extend that idea to business, and you organize people by groups, divisions, departments, projects, and friendship, then a company has the means to quickly disseminate and share information, across many bounds, without the 'slowness' of email and in-person communication. Meaningful communication can be achieved in just a few words and without taking up much time, and the results are immediate and context sensitive.
This streamlined form of communication, called Activity Streams, is the latest improvement to ConcourseConnect. Activity streams allow for users to enter information into a profile, and for followers to comment on and share their activity posts... whether a person, place, thing, group, event, division or department.
Here's a simple example...
Through a sophisticated arrangement of relationships and permissions, information immediately shows up for the intended audience. We've also combined this feature with our previous Email Updates feature so that activity streams are also emailed.
Take a look at this example profile to see the activity stream in action. Just scroll down to see the 'Recent Activity' section.
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ConcourseConnect's latest feature: Email Updates.
Email updates allow users to opt-in to receive emails about activity that is going on in the community. For example, let's say you become a member of a project. If you are an active participant, you might want to be notified several times a day about activity that is occurring in the project. The email update is a list of who did what, including posts in the forums, blog posts, new files, announcements and more. When joining a profile, the user sees the notification options...
Users can decide per profile (whether a project, group, department and more) as to whether that profile's activities are sent daily, weekly or monthly. The notification preferences are also summarized on the user's own profile page for at-a-glance modifications and navigation.
There have also been many tweaks to the user interface. Please explore and comment as to whether you like them or not!
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connect 2.0, email, feature
The latest feature for ConcourseConnect is Twitter integration. What we've done though, might not be what you would have expected. Here's what we did...
- We've assumed that there is already a popular web site out there, called twitter.com, and that users are either intimately familiar with it, or have at least heard of it.
- Next, we assumed that there are already exceptional front-ends for adding tweets to twitter.com... the twitter site itself, or any number of popular desktop and mobile clients -- or even just SMS messaging.
- Finally, all that we ask is that users enter their twitter id in their ConcourseConnect profile, and then when they tweet, they use a ConcourseConnect hashtag. That hashtag is configured per ConcourseConnect site. For Concursive, that tag would be #concursive once our own site is updated.
That's it... users can continue to use their favorite twitter clients and can post relevant information back into ConcourseConnect at the same time.
On the flip side, what you might have expected is for users to be able to post to twitter (or other social networks) from ConcourseConnect. Well, that will be a nice way to share information to other twitter users, but it's not what we have planned for Enterprise 2.0 customers. We think that users will be finding interesting bits of information on twitter through these clients and will want a way to share back into their ConcourseConnect community without having to visit the ConcourseConnect site at the time to post.
Concursive has started using this feature and you can also experiment with it on one of our sample websites. It's fun and supports what users are already doing! You can help us test this feature by creating an account at our Weekend Wanderings sample site, linking your Twitter Id, then going to twitter to post using the #social hashtag. The tweets will appear on the home page and other areas of the site.
Do you like this approach? Leave a comment!
The latest unstable version of ConcourseConnect can be compiled directly from the Google Code ConcourseConnect repository by following the Google Code instructions and using a subversion client. A stable build is not yet ready.
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connect 2.0, feature, twitter
