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
This update is a maintenance release that fixes a bug with Google Maps not displaying on the profile listing pages. All sites are encouraged to update. If Google Maps is disabled, then the maps will no longer be displayed with a javascript message appearing.
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connect 1.0, maintenance release, release
Posted by Tom Manos on
May 7, 2009, 11:45 AM
EDT
ConcourseConnect 1.0, our directory, community, social networking, and web 2.0 product will officially launch in a couple of days, with press releases and all the fanfare. Code will be available here and on Sourceforge before end of day tomorrow (May 8, 2009).
I want to take a minute and talk about my view of what this beast is, and why it's important.
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