On January 15, 2013 we kicked off Version 5.0.

User Privacy Improvements

Each user profile is now set to a "Friends Only" privacy setting. The setting can be changed and this setting allows users to determine with whom they want to share their personal activity stream, blogs, photos, videos and documents with. Most users should use a Group for sharing, though for corporations and large businesses using ConnectElements.com your user profile is a good place to write your status updates. Users can control their privacy settings by going to their Settings page.

Business Process Builder

Smart Process Applications are described by Forrester research as "applications that help firms improve the effectiveness of their human-centric business activities."

With Concursive's Business Process Builder built right into ConcourseConnect, you can start new programs or run initiatives in which you need to follow a process, collect data, and monitor the program's participation.

Steps for using the Business Process Builder:

1. With a program in mind, interactively create the program's phases and steps.
2. For each step, decide what you want the participant to accomplish. Choices include filling out a web-based form, submitting documents, writing comments, or indicating that some other function has been accomplished.
3. Next decide who must complete the step, whether it is an internal participant or an external participant.
4. If there are any supporting forms that are required, use the interactive process to design the form, determine field types and validations, and then attach the form to a step.

Once the program has been started, each iteration of the process is executed within a process container. Here you can specify the participants.

Finally, the program has a dashboard or master rollup of all of the supporting iterations of the program.

Project Timesheets and Expenses

A new module has been added for tracking time and expenses for Accounts and Projects. Roles and rates are configured globally, per account and per project. As time is captured you can decide if it is billable or not, add job details and expenses. Reports are exported on-the-fly to Excel and there are overviews for accounts, people, and projects.

RSS Feeds

Many organizations already have a blog or news feed, and the staff to continue supporting that content, whether it is news, announcements, or other content of interest. These feeds can be used by ConcourseConnect to aggregate news of interest or to incorporate content that an organization already has into their ConcourseConnect community and mobile apps.

With the new RSS Feed module, these articles can be imported directly into an activity stream, into a blog, or browsed through the web-based rss reader.

Self Monitoring

ConcourseConnect monitors the filesystem, database resources, SSL certificates and web resources. If Connect finds any issues they are logged and reported to system administrators.

Without any configuration, here's what is monitored by ConcourseConnect:

• Web Server Status – Are dynamic web pages available and is the content consistent with expectations? Are there any issues with serving static content, like images?
• File System Availability and Free Space – Is there enough disk space for ongoing operation?
• Database Connectivity – Can the database be reached and successfully execute queries?
• SSL Certificate Analysis – Is the SSL certificate expired or soon to expire?
• Network Availability – Is DNS resolving correctly, can the mail server be reached, or are there any connectivity issues?
• CPU Performance – What is the CPU load?

Admins of the site receive the emails periodically only when these issues persist. The email property can be overridden so that emails go to a group email or support address. Set the MONITOR.EMAIL_TO property to one or more email addresses.

Integrations

• Chargify integration has been added for recurring billing and subscription billing to be made available through ConcourseConnect.
• Google Maps support has been updated to support Google Maps v3: higher resolution maps, custom map markers for any profile type, and clickable markers to link to profiles.
• The MapQuest API has been added for geolocation.
• Kaltura video server integration allows videos to be hosted in Kaltura and displayed seamlessly in activity streams and the videos module.