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.

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.

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.

This update is a maintenance release that improves a few items discovered in release 1.0.

It's time to take your business 'social' with ConcourseConnect, a new do-it-yourself social networking software platform.  Taking your business 'social' is a paradigm shift in which users openly share knowledge -- it's a one-to-many community relationship in which users participate with familiar social networking features.

To get started I suggest you take a look at what ConcourseConnect does...

Open Source brings a new dimension to business social software making ConcourseConnect the compelling choice for building commercial communities, social networking sites, and corporate intranets.  This may just be the de facto Java Open Source platform for implementing and deploying social software and social business software.  We aim to make it so and we need your help...

ConcourseConnect 1.0, our directory, community, social networking, and web 2.0 product will officially launch in a couple of days, with press releases and all the fanfare. Code will be available here and on Sourceforge before end of day tomorrow (May 8, 2009).

I want to take a minute and talk about my view of what this beast is, and why it's important.

The ConcourseConnect Early Access Program offers everyone an opportunity to access the beta version of the new ConcourseConnect social networking software. By participating in this free program, you have access to pre-release code, live preview sites, a discussion group, idea forum and issue tracker; which help you get up and running and which also provides essential feedback to the product management team. The early access program:

• Provides you with the ability to do tests of the initial version
• Provides you with the ability to demonstrate the product to prospects in order to generate interest and momentum
• Provides you with an opportunity to get familiar and ready to implement ConcourseConnect when it becomes generally available (GA)
• Provides you with live preview sites for evaluating the product

UPDATE: The Early Access Program is now closed and as a result the first version of ConcourseConnect is now available!  Thanks for helping out.

Search Engine results pages don't look the same as they did a few years ago. While websites still show up in the native results, the variety of of those results has increased dramatically.  A typical search page may include a blog posts, Facebook links, forums, videos, postings about promotions and events, and wiki entries.

The path to optimizing a website no longer runs exclusively through meta tags and home page content.  User generated content is creating a whole new world of options that search engines are using to validate their search results.  By providing a variety of relevant, indexable content to the search engines, you can increase your online visibility.

Concourse Connect provides a number of options to start a community that not only provides brand promotion or customer support, but also give a whole new meaning to search engine optimization.  Major search engines are indexing everything and customers are looking for you everywhere.

According to Forrester, the leading Internet marketing research company, in their latest report on the social media scene, over half (53%) of the 145 interactive marketing professionals surveyed plan to increase their social media budgets.

Why is this?  Social business marketing provides a unique opportunity for businesses to use the Internet to interact with potential and exsiting customers in a much more personal way.  A business can inexpensively create a community of people that want to share ideas, review businesses and products, collaborate on new ideas and tell others a little about themselves. 

Concourse Connect give a business the tools to develop a community around a theme - the business.  And themes create users who are passionate about it and share it with others.  And that's why the recession isn't holding back saavy marketers who recognize the power of passionate communities.