Workers can find the information and people they need faster with social tools. Social tools also make internal information and business processes more visible, findable, and shareable, and makes it possible to see who knows what.
Find ways to compare your productivity levels to see if there is an increase.
Employee Engagement
Social Business Software helps your users collaborate and discuss online. Your workers will spend less time in e-mail and more time in collaborative interaction.
This goal can be measured by reviewing email volume and by periodically conducting employee satisfaction surveys and gaining feedback from the users of the system.
Innovation
Innovation can come from anyone and everyone.
Idea Management includes an idea submission area which can be used to discuss and track successful ideas. Use innovation wikis to collaborate further.
Improve Customer Experience
Productivity gains can also lead to an improved customer experience. Employees have greater access to answers and tools to track issues across departments. Compare your customer retention and satisfaction levels.
Social Engagement
Employees can build connections in an organization, busting through silos. Find out who the experts are in your organization.
Sales & Turnover
There are now consistently reported benefits of social for most organizations.
Use Social Business Software as a competitive advantage. After using Social Business Software, compare sales figures and sales generated per employee.
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on
April 26, 2011, 10:00 AM
EDT
At Concursive, we pride ourselves on creating comprehensive products and platforms which are easy to compile, install, upgrade and customize from source. Take for example, ConcourseSuite CRM: once installed, the application works just as well on a disconnected network as it does on the Internet. ConcourseConnect, the enterprise social computing and social networking platform, achieves the same goal, but when connected to the Internet it takes advantage of additional resources when they are available and configured: Google Maps and Geolocation APIs, Google Analytics, Twitter API, Facebook Sharing, Authorize.net and Web Services for Remote Portlets.
Installation is a snap, as the products only require a Java installation, Apache Tomcat Web Server and PostgreSQL Database Server. The Portlet Portals, cache and distributed cache, indexed searches, APIs, Workflow Engine, Decisioning Engine, Messaging and Security are all embedded without additional servers and services to manage. When more infrastructure is needed, Concursive products can be load-balanced by toggling a few configuration parameters for the load-balancer and turning services on and off for specific instances.
Access to the latest source, and having your own customization branch is essential to leveraging the platform. Our partners use the source to add-on features, tailor the source to their developers, customize dashboards and fields, and create new functionality that is contributed and integrated back into the core releases when possible.
Here are three examples:
OpenStrides, a Concursive Partner in India, uses the CRM source code to enhance the customer's dashboards with Flash generated graphs, fuzzy search improvements in the Leads module, and new functionality in the Accounts module which allows for arbitrary fields to be added to the Accounts page from the Admin module.
Chaikin Power Tools, which provides individual investors with decision-making tools previously available only to Wall Street professionals, has launched their web site on ConcourseConnect. The initial phase uses ConcourseConnect as the web and content platform, with future possibilities of launching a community given the capabilities and features of Connect. This is a great looking site that was well thought out. Aside from the custom theme, this site uses on-the-fly content pages for creating landing pages by the community manager, the site hosts several mobile web pages, and there is integration with a backend PDF report generator server. This site is integrated with ConcourseSuite CRM.
Chairman's View, a company which helps businesses assess and understand their enterprise value and identify strengths and weaknesses that can affect their value, has launched an e-commerce site using ConcourseConnect, called MyCoreValue.com. The site utilizes a custom theme to convey information using the real-time content management editor. This site is also the first to implement Concursive's Decision Support System which allows partners to fill out an online business assessment survey and then receive a dynamically generated PDF file, with calculations based on the input, as email.
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on
September 27, 2010, 9:50 AM
EDT
Concursive is currently deploying customers on unreleased versions of ConcourseConnect 3.0 and ConcourseSuite 6.1. We have been fine tuning the releases for several months and they represent the best versions we offer. ConcourseConnect 3.0 includes features like Importing Users, a Photo Gallery, Streamlined Invitations, a 3rd party client API, UI improvements and a video module for the final release. We have done some integrations that customers can try, like OpenMeetings support. ConcourseSuite 6.1 is all about product consistency and stability. The 6.1 release might include a few unannounced features we are working on.
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 suite for enabling groups in ConcourseConnect with their own Social CRM tools.
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.
If you are interested in the latest commercial versions of ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite, please contact us so we can get in touch with you. Concursive offers On-Demand, Hosted and Enterprise deployments.
Today marks the one year anniversary of ConcourseConnect. There's a lot to take away during the last year, but perhaps the most important is that ConcourseConnect has proven that is a stable solution for enterprise collaboration. Let me break this down...
ConcourseConnect is successfully in use in production by customers that were paying for Jive SBS, Ning, and others. Concursive supports these communities through our Enterprise support package. In many situations, partners become the community managers and have gone through extensive Concursive training to provide social networking solutions to their customers.
The Open Source version of ConcourseConnect has reached 6,700 downloads, which comes out to at least 550 downloads a month. That doesn't include the direct source code checkouts either. ConcourseConnect has to be the easiest, full-featured social networking software to install, especially compared to other wiki and collaboration software like MindTouch, Socialtext and Liferay.
ConnectElements.com, the SaaS version of ConcourseConnect has reached 2,500 users! Setting up an account at www.connectelements.com is the easiest way to begin using ConcourseConnect for your organization. ConnectElements.com provides a private area in which you can create groups and projects, choosing just the participants involved for each one. To gain greater control or to host your own supported community, choose ConcourseConnect Express or ConcourseConnect Enterprise. If you need help, contact us!
ConnectElements 2.0 has been in the works for quite some time – and has already been deployed to dozens of customers and early adopters. ConnectElements is maintained by Concursive and has been refined through our relationship with customers, partners and the over 15,000 community members at Concursive.com.
Year one has been interesting, thanks especially to the small team of developers and project managers that continue to persevere and innovate at a quick pace. If you have any ideas or suggestions for us, please visit our Ideas page to contribute. If you're looking for a social networking platform, then give us a try!
After attending a moving presentation from Don Tapscott (of Wikinomics fame) at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, almost two years ago, I felt encouraged about the work Concursive was doing with centralized tools for businesses. The CRM had the right features for sales force automation and document management, and managers were happy seeing daily roll-ups of opportunities and action planning. Don had convinced me that there needed to be more collaborative elements in the business process, "a paradigm shift."
;)
;)
;)
