When you've reached a point in which you are ready to start a new web site, Concursive can help by setting up a site for you with all of the content management and social networking features we offer.
The most basic question we always ask up front is what kind of site do you want?
The options are:
Web site
Setup a public site and collaborative web presence all in one. This is the option if you want to host a web site using Concursive's platform and you may or may not want any or all of the collaboration features.
A public special interest site that fosters collaboration around a particular theme. Users will setup profiles and communicate using a variety of collaboration tools. Community managers can create ad-hoc collaboration spaces to further group activity around shorter-term events.
A public site fostering collaboration around a directory of places, things and people highlighting reviews as an important feature. After choosing this site type Concursive will help you define profile types to extend the available directories.
A public site that supplements an existing website with rich community features and an idea forum. Create an FAQ, discussion board and manage an idea forum.
A private site to collaborate and exchange information and documents with clients. This setup features a full activity stream and other collaboration modules.
Regardless of which type you choose, each of the types has full access to all of the content management and social networking modules that ConcourseConnect has to offer. Choosing a type just gives us a sense of the direction you want to go in and for the most part doesn't lock you in to any specific functionality of the platform.
Today we're announcing improvements for both ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite CRM at www.concoursecloud.com.
Starting today, the Small Business and Medium-Size Business installs receive double the storage and up to double the bandwidth! The Large Business installs maintain an already low price and high value configuration.
Get started for only $99 per month!
Customers choose ConcourseConnect because they want to increase and improve collaboration in their business or organization. ConcourseConnect helps bring people together virtually to generate and share useful information and knowledge, and to solve problems effectively. Tools for your Groups and Projects include Activity Streams, Blogs, Wikis, Documents, Issue Tracking, Planning, and Tasks. That's what you get with ConcourseConnect at ConcourseCloud – an optimized version of ConcourseConnect for business collaboration!
If you're looking for Customer Relationship Management, look no further than ConcourseSuite CRM. As part of our cloud offering, you receive a broad set of CRM features to streamline your sales process, target your best customers and generate qualified leads, and improve your customer's experience. Features include Lead tracking, Account and Contact Information Management, Email Marketing, Help Desk and more. The cloud offering is our most basic configuration suitable for many types of businesses that don't require much customization out of the box, but which require a great CRM experience.
Concursive Corporation brought ConcourseConnect to market in 2007 and ConcourseSuite CRM to market in 2003. Since then we have continually updated the applications for a better user-experience and better functionality. Concursive designs and deploys highly transformative social web sites based on ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite CRM technology. This unique product offering allows our customers to launch social web sites that attract and retain visitors.
Contact Concursive to discuss deploying your next web site on Concursive's social and mobile social technology.
We build social sites as a focal point for user-generated content. These sites require an ongoing user base, technical functionality and dedication from the site owners. Without any one of these, the site likely fails.
Users… these are the key contributors to your site. Users bring with them experience, curiosity, interests and friends. They ask questions, answer questions and post about their experiences. They have a desire for the latest news, events and offerings. Users share the information on the site.
Functionality… to engage your users. Users read, share and comment on content. They often post news, events and photos. Most are open to creating a social profile. The site functionality needs those features and a solid user experience to encourage them to participate. Other features help the site owners learn from the community including challenges, polls and surveys.
Dedication… to adapt to your users and keep your site fresh. Community managers keep a pulse on the community. Community managers help write content and disseminate information, often gleamed from external sites like Twitter. Community managers respond to content issues, sometimes of which is spam, user content that is deemed inappropriate, or disorganized information. Community managers share in the experience.
Through dedication and functionality, users often give the site a life of their own. Trust between users and site owners is important.
At Concursive, we pride ourselves on creating comprehensive products and platforms which are easy to compile, install, upgrade and customize from source. Take for example, ConcourseSuite CRM: once installed, the application works just as well on a disconnected network as it does on the Internet. ConcourseConnect, the enterprise social computing and social networking platform, achieves the same goal, but when connected to the Internet it takes advantage of additional resources when they are available and configured: Google Maps and Geolocation APIs, Google Analytics, Twitter API, Facebook Sharing, Authorize.net and Web Services for Remote Portlets.
Installation is a snap, as the products only require a Java installation, Apache Tomcat Web Server and PostgreSQL Database Server. The Portlet Portals, cache and distributed cache, indexed searches, APIs, Workflow Engine, Decisioning Engine, Messaging and Security are all embedded without additional servers and services to manage. When more infrastructure is needed, Concursive products can be load-balanced by toggling a few configuration parameters for the load-balancer and turning services on and off for specific instances.
Access to the latest source, and having your own customization branch is essential to leveraging the platform. Our partners use the source to add-on features, tailor the source to their developers, customize dashboards and fields, and create new functionality that is contributed and integrated back into the core releases when possible.
Here are three examples:
OpenStrides, a Concursive Partner in India, uses the CRM source code to enhance the customer's dashboards with Flash generated graphs, fuzzy search improvements in the Leads module, and new functionality in the Accounts module which allows for arbitrary fields to be added to the Accounts page from the Admin module.
Chaikin Power Tools, which provides individual investors with decision-making tools previously available only to Wall Street professionals, has launched their web site on ConcourseConnect. The initial phase uses ConcourseConnect as the web and content platform, with future possibilities of launching a community given the capabilities and features of Connect. This is a great looking site that was well thought out. Aside from the custom theme, this site uses on-the-fly content pages for creating landing pages by the community manager, the site hosts several mobile web pages, and there is integration with a backend PDF report generator server. This site is integrated with ConcourseSuite CRM.
Chairman's View, a company which helps businesses assess and understand their enterprise value and identify strengths and weaknesses that can affect their value, has launched an e-commerce site using ConcourseConnect, called MyCoreValue.com. The site utilizes a custom theme to convey information using the real-time content management editor. This site is also the first to implement Concursive's Decision Support System which allows partners to fill out an online business assessment survey and then receive a dynamically generated PDF file, with calculations based on the input, as email.
Concursive is currently deploying customers on unreleased versions of ConcourseConnect 3.0 and ConcourseSuite 6.1. We have been fine tuning the releases for several months and they represent the best versions we offer. ConcourseConnect 3.0 includes features like Importing Users, a Photo Gallery, Streamlined Invitations, a 3rd party client API, UI improvements and a video module for the final release. We have done some integrations that customers can try, like OpenMeetings support. ConcourseSuite 6.1 is all about product consistency and stability. The 6.1 release might include a few unannounced features we are working on.
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 suite for enabling groups in ConcourseConnect with their own Social CRM tools.
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.
If you are interested in the latest commercial versions of ConcourseConnect and ConcourseSuite, please contact us so we can get in touch with you. Concursive offers On-Demand, Hosted and Enterprise deployments.
Today marks the one year anniversary of ConcourseConnect. There's a lot to take away during the last year, but perhaps the most important is that ConcourseConnect has proven that is a stable solution for enterprise collaboration. Let me break this down...
ConcourseConnect is successfully in use in production by customers that were paying for Jive SBS, Ning, and others. Concursive supports these communities through our Enterprise support package. In many situations, partners become the community managers and have gone through extensive Concursive training to provide social networking solutions to their customers.
The Open Source version of ConcourseConnect has reached 6,700 downloads, which comes out to at least 550 downloads a month. That doesn't include the direct source code checkouts either. ConcourseConnect has to be the easiest, full-featured social networking software to install, especially compared to other wiki and collaboration software like MindTouch, Socialtext and Liferay.
ConnectElements.com, the SaaS version of ConcourseConnect has reached 2,500 users! Setting up an account at www.connectelements.com is the easiest way to begin using ConcourseConnect for your organization. ConnectElements.com provides a private area in which you can create groups and projects, choosing just the participants involved for each one. To gain greater control or to host your own supported community, choose ConcourseConnect Express or ConcourseConnect Enterprise. If you need help, contact us!
ConnectElements 2.0 has been in the works for quite some time – and has already been deployed to dozens of customers and early adopters. ConnectElements is maintained by Concursive and has been refined through our relationship with customers, partners and the over 15,000 community members at Concursive.com.
Year one has been interesting, thanks especially to the small team of developers and project managers that continue to persevere and innovate at a quick pace. If you have any ideas or suggestions for us, please visit our Ideas page to contribute. If you're looking for a social networking platform, then give us a try!
on January 4, 2012 8:50 AM
