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.

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.

As you've no doubt seen (and if you haven't, check out Connect757), we've been more than just experimenting with video in the last few weeks.

The results have been pretty spectacular.

It's no big feat to embed a flash video player into a web page, it seems like everyone does that. What makes videos in Concourse Connect so special is that we can schedule them, we can chat and comment about them in real time, and we've integrated them both at the highest level in a Connect system, and at the individual levels of Groups, Businesses, and other profiles.

We started with the simplest and most pervasive: youtube. Including a youtube video in a blog or wiki is as simple as including a graphic file in our WYSIWYG editor. Youtube is built in.

But that didn't remain very fun for very long, and pretty soon we were wanting live video. Embedding a basic, live video stream turned out to be almost comically simple. Once you knew how to produce live broadcasts using your preferred provider and how to work with the embed codes, you could just copy and paste into the html editor, and you had a viewer. Nice, but still not what we wanted.

So next we integrated the various live video services (ustream, watershed, youtube, justin.tv, mystream) into the configuration for each profile. This allows our users to set them up once, and then very transparently access their video streams on any of the services on their own pages. Services like ustream allow our users to do free live broadcasts to their Connect profile. It's quite impressive.

We're still getting all the use cases sorted out for the video services, but we're using it all now to great effect in Connect757.

But I still don't like the idea of relying solely on 3rd party services to stream video, so we've been working on a fully integrated streaming video server for ConcourseConnect. The work is going very well, and you can even see the results in one of my blog posts. This video is one I took at my daughter's school using a tiny hand-held camera, and uploaded to our beta video server. It plays great and the server gives us lots of capabilities with respect to branding the videos, monitoring the server, and extracting usage statistics. Our server will handle just about any kind of video you throw at it: Windows Media, Quicktime, all the various mpeg standards, and more. It does on the fly transcoding, and has lots of other useful and cool features. We'll be testing and incorporating more of those features in the next week or so.

Maintaining your own streaming video server may not be for everyone running a Connect system - it takes work, hardware, and bandwidth. But for our larger customers, a complete, integrated system with video server is a very powerful tool.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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...

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Enterprise social computing, take notice -- there's a lot packed into this product and 2.0 delivers on being secure, flexible, inspiring and easy to get started with!  ConcourseConnect is a solid platform for launching your next community.  It's in use by global corporations and small businesses alike. 

While some products jive more on marketing then actual substance, ConcourseConnect couldn't be more different and more flexible.  We've actually taken notice that our competitors are trying to catch up to our core features and we're flattered!  We're not done though, as we have lots of new features in the pipeline and some catching up to do ourselves.

Some history… ConcourseConnect 1.0 establishes several key components of collaboration -- every user has a space to build upon and enhance, users can jointly collaborate in shared spaces, and public spaces allow for creating directories of useful information with integrated collaboration throughout.  We took a 3-pronged approach -- allow users to register, allow them to add content, and encourage them to participate.

Here' s a few highlights from ConcourseConnect 2.0:

• Dimdim web meetings can be scheduled right from the calendar events page
• YouTube videos can be placed in blogs and wikis (like these videos)
• ConcourseSuite integration allows for essential community management
• Each space can be extended with ConcourseSuite CRM tools for space-by-space management
• Improvements to several modules including: wikis, tags and customization
• Security configurations for completely private sites and semi-private sites

So, how do you want to start your next community?

You can choose the open-source version and install it yourself or choose Concursive and let us install and maintain the application for you, and work through all of the details in putting the finishing touches on your community before it launches.  Be sure to insist on the add-on community management features and the integrated marketing and CRM tools.

ConcourseConnect 2.0 is currently used in production systems and will be finalized for general release soon.

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.

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.