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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In the Concourse Connect social networking suite, every individual profile, whether a registered user, a company, a group or a project has a wiki tab that allows users with the proper permissions to add content. Wiki's are useful in a number of ways, but there are two use cases that stand out. Let's call them the Smooth and the Knowledge.
The Smooth Wiki is used in a business to keep a process moving along. Suppose your loading dock is tracking shipments into your plant. All along the route, people are adding infprmation about the shipmemts location, size, distribution, etc. Anyone reading the wiki has an up to the minute view of the status of that specific order. Now imagine a company receiving hundreds of shipments a day and the Smooth Wiki becomes a useful tool.
The Knowledge Wiki may be even more important to an organization. Every person has knowledge about their own area that would be useful to share so that others could benefit from. Giving access to the Knowledge Wiki to a wide variety of users in various departments - sales, marketing, human resources - and encouraging short entries that are organized around specific topics creates a real time operations manual written by the people using those processes every day. Imagine a new hire being able to access a deep wiki category, updated regularly, to learn about his new responsibilites from the people he'll be working with, instead of an SOP manual that gets updated once a year.
Since they're not perceived as being mission critical, Knowledge Wiki's have a harder time getting established. But if management realizes the value and encourages their use, they can become every bit as important as the Smooth Wiki.
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Posted by Tom Manos on
June 29, 2009, 1:05 PM
EDT
Imagine you are a business owner who wants to host webinars in support of a new product. Or maybe you're managing a project with members distributed nationally, or even world-wide. Perhaps you are a member of a distributed users group who wants to make a presentation over the net.
Web conferencing, presentations, and webinars are a large part of most companies sales and marketing efforts these days. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to simply manage all your web meeting needs right from within your community?
ConcourseConnect now allows you to do all these things and more, simply and inexpensively - even free!
Read on for the rest of the story...
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You are a company with 9 locations, many workers on the road or working from home, you read an article about a competitor rolling out a new process and you think your company can improve upon it and use it in your business. In this scenario, the emails fly, the conference calls start and everyone involved in the process has their own spreadsheets and notes.
ConcourseConnect, when configured as a collaboration tool for a company Intranet, as shown here, let's you set up a dedicated Group with features that include project management, document library, discussion forums, blogging and more. When a new idea evolves for a different process, employees will set up an Idea project with the same collaborative functionality to work collectively to flesh it out.
A company's intellectual resources can be spread out across the country, around the world or on the same floor of an office building. Those companies need a centralized location with easy to use tools to leverage their employees experience, imagination and desire to make the company a more efficient and competitive place to work. Read more here about how ConcourseConnect can enable your organization's intellectual capital.
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A community by definition is a "unified body of individuals". When it comes to building communities of people on the Internet, the more tools that a person has to display the public side of themselves or their company, the better. Blogs, wikis, forums, and review tools for the members of a community to use to promote themselves are as important as they are for the businesses and organizations in the community.
But companies may want their employees to work togehter in groups or projects that they don't want the public to view. This would be the private side of a public community. A user starts a project, invites others to join it and they collaborate to resolve an issue or complete a customer requirement. Only those users that have been invited can see the project and participate. To everyone else, it doesn't exist.
Concurse Connect has a robust project management capabitlity that allows a team to work together privately in an otherwise public directory. Users and businesses have their individual 2.0 tools to educate others about themselves and the community owner uses the power of emplyee collaboration to advance the interests of the business.
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Recently, Jet Blue tested a blog and wiki software package with 200 members of their internal training division. There was much discussion about whether to allow users to generate personal information or use the software strictly for business.
It was decided that if the JetBlue users were allowed to talk to one another, not just about innovation in learning and development programs, but also to share photos from family vacations, weddings and birthdays, they would get to know one another better as individuals, and would more easily share ideas and participate in virtual groups and projects.
As the JetBlue example illustrates, the process of getting to know one another better through the corporate community promotes adoption of the technology and generates the collaboration and innovation that companies are looking for.
Concourse Connect, a full featured collaboration package, is highly configuable and gives customers the flexibility to enable users to generate personal information from a menu of social tools. View a demo of our collaboration configuration here.
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