Imagine you are a business owner who wants to host webinars in support of a new product. Or maybe you're managing a project with members distributed nationally, or even world-wide. Perhaps you are a member of a distributed users group who wants to make a presentation over the net.

Web conferencing, presentations, and webinars are a large part of most companies sales and marketing efforts these days. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to simply manage all your web meeting needs right from within your community?

ConcourseConnect now allows you to do all these things and more, simply and inexpensively - even free!

Read on for the rest of the story...

A business decides to set up a social marketing presence where they can do a few things - communicate directly with customers and prospects through blogs, wikis and forums, provide a venue for customer support through company posts and customer comments, or introduce new products or services to a targeted audience.  The site is membership based so users can participate and communicate, and they get a profile page themselves.

Now suppose the business has suppliers who would like to reach that same audience - how would they do that?  Concourse Connect has built in a middle layer of access, think of them as storefronts, called business profiles.  Any supplier, vendor or interested organization can create a business profile in our application. Each profile has a full suite of Web 2.0 tools so each business can set up their own community within the main one.  Here's an example of a business profile inside our Gourmet Oasis demonstration site.  Now these busineeses are addressing the members of that community directly and benefitting the owner of the Community by creating more traffic and awareness.

Would those suppliers pay for the privilege of having a presence in the community?  We have a number of ideas on how directories can generate revenue for the owners.

This update is a maintenance release that improves a few items discovered since the last release.

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.