Introducing new Communote Version 1.1

Last Monday, Communote online system was updated to the brand new version 1.1. This release also marks the end of our beta-phase. Communote is available for commercial production use from now on. At this point, we would like to thank all of our users that used and testet Communote as online service or inhouse installation since autumn last year. Your feedback has helped us tremendeously to improve our product. Many of your hints and tips have been integrated in this new release, others are still on the list of planned features.

This article aims to introduce you to the new features. Briefly summarized the new features in release 1.1 are:

• redesign of the web interface
• tabbed navigation (all notes, blog and @replies)
• new note editor
• inline replies and threaded discussions
• posting public notes that are not assigned to a blog
• permalinks for blogs, notes and users
• user profiles
• download page for mobile clients and widgets

New design of web interface

This has been the most challenging part of the entire new release! And it has been quite a new feeling for all of our existing Communote users. We didn’t only want to make Communote look brighter and fresher than before. Our main concern was the one hand to make the note stream more readable without distraction and to make taking notes even easier than before. On the other hand, the many helpful advanced features should be available at your fingertips if needed. We have got some very nice feedback already. Take a look yourself by clicking on the image above or (even better) by registering for a demo or enterprise account.

Tabbed navigation

We have learned from other applications that tabs can help to better get to grips with multiple view on the content. So, now we use tabs to separate the all-notes-view from the blog-view. This also made it possible to give you direct access to notes that have been directed to you, the @replies. More tabs will follow soon, stay tuned.

Improved note editor

Our Communote users love the 140+ characters available, the in-text #tags and @replies  as well as the possibility to format a note if needed. Therefore, we took care of the important editor component and used the tabbing paradigm again to hide the tagging, crosspost, user selection and file upload tools and in the meatime making them quicker to find.

Threaded discussions

One of the features that many of our active users demand was the support for inline replies and threaded discussions. And here it is.

Communote now lets you write your comments right below the commented article. Furthermore, the structure of the discussion is beeing kept in the database. Thus, a discussion thread can be displayed by clicking on the discussion icon. The author of the commented post is being informed via @reply automatically.

Public notes

The structuring of a Communote Microblogging system ino separate microblogs for different topics, teams or projects is one of our most important enterprise features. On the other hand, it’s sometimes a little bit too much effort to always select a blog ony for postings a simple note that shall be seen by any user. Therefore, we have introduced public notes. This means that if you write a note into Communote without prior selection of a blog it will be ‘public’, i.e. readably in everybodies “all notes” view. This makes starting with Communote even easier.

You don’t really like that? No problem, the public notes feature can be disabled in the systems settings by your administrator user.

Permalinks for blogs, notes and users

A Communote microblog can be a valuable source of information. Too bad, that you could use direct hyperlinks to certain notes, users or blogs within Communote – before the new release! From now on, you can link to any single note, blog or user via permanent hyperlinks. The format is quite simple, e.g. /portal/blogs/myblog for a blog and /portal/blogs/myblog/123 for a note (with id 123) or /portal/users/mac for a user. The permanent URLs can be found behind the date, user and blog details of a note, below the text as seen in the image on the right.

Additionally, it should be mentioned that #tags and @replies are now hyperlinked in the note text to make filtering even easier.

User profiles

The contact details of any user can now be displayed by selecting “display profile” after moving the mouse pointer over the user’s image. On that, a brief user profile with contact details shows up. The profile is still a little simple, there is more to come in future.

As you may have noticed, the user profile is displayed inline at the top of the main section of the screen. This is another new UI paradigm that we will apply more often in future to make it easier for you to handle.

Download page

Last but not least you will find a new download page available via the “Download” hyperlink in the page header. From this page you can:

• download the current version of the java-based mobile client (e.g. for Balckberry or Nokia phones)
• access the hyperlinks for the mobile web frontends developed specifically for mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhone.

Thank you, Communote developers!

It’s been quite hard work to make this new release happen. Therefore, this is the place to say a big “thank you” to all of our developers: Torsten, Ronny, Detlef, Christopher, Falk, Niels, Adrian, Rene, Lukas, Tobias & Tobias, Markus, Enrico, Nils and Jens! (Don’t hurt me, please, if I should have forgotten someone.)

These guys are still quite busy. In one of the next blog post we will let you know more about the features that will be released soon. Please, stay tuned.

Now it’s your turn

We would like to hear from you whether or not you like about the new version of Communote. Please use the feedback-Link or the comments function below to let us know what can be done even better.

To take a look at Communote you can either register as enterprise customer and benefit from our 3 months free trial period or you can sign up for a or a demo account. You might also take a look at the screencast demo video at the homepage that gives a short introduction to Communote. If you would like to get a broader overview on Enterprise Microblogging you might also look at our brand new Communote Video, the presentation on “The revolution of  business communication” or our Communote use cases.