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.

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.