For any number of reasons, a user may need to be disabled or removed from the system. There are several options here.

Administrators can set an expiration date for a user's account. This is important if the user has been granted temporary access to the system. Perhaps a consultant, vendor, or temporary employee. This is done in the Admin module on a per-user basis. The administrator can also disable a user when they no longer need access. This method maintains all of the user-generated content.

Sometimes users create accounts, they have passed the verification steps, and then they want to be removed from the site, or in the case of unwanted sign-ups, the user needs to be removed for business reasons. Business reasons can be as simple as spam accounts, those user accounts setup to link to other sites or generate content for the purpose of promoting products and services. In those cases, the user account was not setup for the purpose of collaborating and enjoying the site.

A new feature lets administrators go to the user profile in question, and then choose to delete the user. The user's profile is removed from the system completely, and their email address is marked as no longer acceptable. The user will not be able to login with that email address, nor can it be used for future access. Releated user-generated content is automatically removed.

ConcourseConnect has several features when it comes to user registrations.

On an open system, users are free to register and become users. There are two default safeguards: the first is that the user must correctly fill out a captcha, and the second is that the user must validate the account by following a confirmation link sent by email.

An additional option is for the administrators to approve all sign-ups. With this option enabled, the user signs-up as normal, and then the administrators receive the confirmation link in which they can approve or deny. This feature has proven useful for semi-open communities in which there public content and you want specific users to register.

Linking your site to Facebook's Login is another option. When you configure both the ConcourseConnect system and the Facebook API with your site's information, users are presented with an option to "Login with Facebook." This option allows users instant access to your site, while Facebook provides all of the validation and authorization of your users. I like this option because Facebook has already verified your user in some way.

ConcourseConnect also has its own token-based sign-up which allows for ConcourseConnect to be plugged into existing websites. In this case your existing site already has user logins, and with some basic programming, site users see a button, called anything you want, which allows one-click access to ConcourseConnect. The sites communicate user information behind-the-scenes and users flow freely from one site to the other.

Finally, a completely closed system means that only administrators and certain users with permission can invite users to the system. In this case the registration feature is turned off and users must fill out a request to become a user.

Now that you have users in your system, my followup blog post explains how to handle the ones that got through your filters.

As part of Concursive's initiative to provide a simple, cost-effective solution for social business software available at ConcourseCloud.com, we took some time to create some really useful documentation too (thanks Gareth!).

Here are the direct links:

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.

Challenges is a new module from Concursive that helps drive users to your community in an interesting and unique way. The premise is that users suggest various challenges, with the most popular suggestions being activated. The Challenge of the Day may take several days to accomplish, and users indicate when they've met the goals of the challenge.

Some example challenges might be:

• Walk 3 miles today
• Take a picture with your boss
• Meet a sales objective

You can try out Challenges here:

http://social.preview.concursive.com/challenges.shtml

In this week's update to ConcourseConnect (available for ConcourseCloud.com and Enterprise customers), we have rolled out a personalized Assignments page and have made the Task module a standard configuration for newly created Projects.

Read on for screenshots and more information.

ConcourseConnect 3.0 is taking shape and includes features like Importing Users, a Photo Gallery, Streamlined Invitations, 3rd party client API for mobile clients, UI improvements and a video module for the final release. Concursive has done some integrations that users can try in the early access version, like OpenMeetings support.

ConcourseConnect 3.0 is in active development. Concursive customers receive early access to ConcourseConnect 3.0. Once the release has been finalized, the binary and source will be available for download. 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 plug-in for enabling groups in ConcourseConnect to have their own CRM tools.

If you are interested in the latest commercial versions of ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite, please contact us so we can get in touch with you. 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.

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?