This is the first feature roundup so this will mostly be a list of improvements and changes to ConcourseConnect over the past few months.
Upgrades are continuously rolled out to customers as development items are completed, features are tested, and issues resolved. Upgrades typically occur with a specific customer site and then the feature is rolled out gradually to others.
What's new in Connect?
- Badges have been integrated with the search engine to filter results by badges
- New data directories can be added via the Admin module; each receives a data-driven/dynamic landing page with portlets for showing profiles, searching and adding new data
- More widgets and modules have been updated with the Zurb Foundation UI
- More UI Buttons and Icons use FontAwesome
- The user list can be exported to Excel for analysis
- Added INR and CHF currencies
- Profile custom data and Profile user-related custom data has been added to profiles and the api to record custom data
- An OpenDataSoft portlet has been added to integrate with OpenDataSoft Data Portals
What's changed in Connect?
- In process or broken images now retry and fallback to a default
- Google Analytics updates
- Facebook integration updates
- Profile wiki can show information from the profile's custom data
- Search results can show a badge next to the profile
- Landing pages adapt to the number of underlying profile data... showing the complete list of profiles or showing just what's new and linking to a show more page
- User messaging rules require you to be friends, although an Admin can always initiate a conversation
- User experience improvements
What's new with the API?
- /api/category added to create campaign categories
- /api/checkIn tags capability
- /api/checkInList returns date range, tags, messages
- /api/message treated the same as web messages
- /api/photoList can be limited to geocoded entries and shape boundaries
- /api/profileList can be limited to geocoded entries and shape boundaries, can include badge info
- /api/site includes useful information about the user including badges and capabilities
- /api/status
- /api/statusList
What's new with mobile?
- Photos can be geocoded and shown on a map
- User generated data points can be put on a map and updated at a later time
- Data can be bound by geographic shapes
- Search improvements to locate information via a narrow scope or a less granular scope; improvements to searching by a location; nearest/best/popular/newest sorting
- Can show web pages designed in Connect as part of a module
- As users pan the map, new data is loaded
- In iOS, the app icon badge count can be remotely pushed by Connect based on profile and message updates
- Place data can be augmented by Here.com information
- And more
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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.
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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.
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Posted by Tom Manos on
May 24, 2010, 10:15 AM
EDT
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.
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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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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connect 2.0, feature, twitter
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.
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collaboration, connect 2.0, feature, security
This update is a maintenance release that improves a few items discovered since the last release.
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connect 1.0, maintenance release, release
This update is a maintenance release that improves a few items discovered in release 1.0.
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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.
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