We are pleased to announce a new Release of our Enterprise Microblogging Service Communote. The new version contains significant changes in the administration area, e.g. the creation of user groups and license purchase option.

The User and Administration Manuel for Communote is now available. The user manual is in the download area, the administrator manual is in the administration area within the Communote application prepared for download. Both documents are also in German and English available at our website.

Communote remains free up to 10 users. Starting from July 1st 2010 user credits will be charged if you are using Communote with more than 10 active users. For the month of July 2010, you will automatically receive free credits for each active user in your system. Credits can be easily purchased through the administration area in Communote starting at maximum 1 € per User (excl. VAT) and month or even less if you purchase larger amounts of credits.

Communote is now available for download at our website for installation within your company (Windows/Linux). Many corporate clients requested this option besides our existing online service. The initial system configuration can be done via web interface. Communote supports Postgres and MySQL database.

Before going more into details for features and improvements, I would like to give a brief outlook for our next release. Shortly we will provide the desired “Following” feature for blogs, people and notes. In addition, we will provide a direct messaging function.

The following features are now available:

New administration area

The Communote administration frontend  has been significantly improved. The new design and structure makes it easy to facilitate the administration of the system.

Support for user groups

This feature allows to create and assign user groups for Communote. User groups can be assigned to a blog with rights. The administrator can define groups and add users to a group or even a group to a group.

Rights Synchronization

Basic functionality to synchronize and transfer user rights in third party applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence or LDAP is implemented.

Public Access

For an integration scenario the use of this feature is very interesting. It allows anonymous access to the content of Communote Blogs without login. This is helpful for the introduction of microblogging within the company and increases the range of information from Communote significantly. A two-stage safety mechanism prevents random access, as the general administrator must release the function and the blog manager must also explicitly enable public access.

Configuration settings

System Messages to inform other Blog Members that the rights in the Blog changed are now per default turned off. System messages e.g. in a sensitive area can be activated now for each blog. Many Users asked for this Feature.

For XMPP and e-mail notifications, the Permalink to a note can be turned off in the administration area.

Furthermore numerous small usability improvements and Bugs have been fixed.

Companies are becoming aware of the continued success of Web 2.0 services such as Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter and discover these tools to improve communication with their customers. In the enterprise context the term Enterprise 2.0 has established for the current change itself, this is not only for the use of Web 2.0 tools to communicate externally, but also for internal use within the enterprise. As an example for this is to break old communication patterns and structures, as well as a simplified information access for better information and knowledge sharing. The potential is beyond rigid hierarchies and inflexible processes.

A possible answer to these challenges are Enterprise Microblogging solutions, such as Communote, for open communication about topics and projects. However, verifiably benefits and the Return on Investment (RoI) of the so-called Social Software such as Enterprise Microblogging is still missing. In cooperation with the TU Chemnitz and the Communardo Software GmbH a convergence to the solution is made within a thesis by Alrik Degenkolb.

In this blog post about the current state and approaches of the thesis, a model has already been presented, which can assist in the calculation of the RoI and showing the success factors of Enterprise Microblogging.

Help us with the identification of particularly valuable applications of Enterprise Microblogging and make a contribution to a first approximation of the Return on Investment. By participating in the survey, you help to make the value of Enterprise Microblogging visible.

[https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NQNSYC7]

The answers are carefully evaluated and after the completion of the survey the results of the thesis and of the survey will be published on the Communote blog.

We look forward to your active participation and feedback to the survey.

Recently, a number of new publications on the topic of Enterprise Microblogging have appeared that we would like to share with you. Two interesting papers deal particularly with the analysis of the different genres of using Microblogging.

It can be clearly demonstrated that the use of Web 2.0 tools, such as Microblogging, in the corporate context is very different from Twitter. As the Twitter study 2009 by Pearanalytics shows, there is for example no spam and ‘pointless babble’ in the company. Instead of that, status updates (from meetings, telephone conferences, current tasks), task coordination, questions and answers as well as discussions and providing information of interest (“I found an interesting study”, etc.) dominate here.

It is also amazing that experienced corporate microblogger may distribute a variety of tasks and information to different audiences with just one note. This shows impressively how productive Microblogging is applied in the company (e.g. at Communardo and a variety of Communote customers).

The results of  these studies are available online and can be submitted as papers at international conferences:

Enterprise Microblogging: Procrastination or productive use? In: Proceedings 16th Americas Conference on Information Systems. Lima, Peru.

Tweet Inside: Microblogging in a Corporate Context. In: Proceedings 23rd Bled eConference. eTrust: Implications for the Individual, Enterprises and Society. Bled, Slovenia.

You are confident about the use cases of Communote – Enterprise Micoblogging? You already created a Communote account und familiarized yourself with the features? But you don’t know how to start?

We would like to give you some important hints for a successful implementation of Communote into your enterprise. After introducing the topic of communication with micro messages in the enterprise in the presentation “The revolution of business communication” and showing concrete fields of application with “Use Cases” as a second step, we would now like to support you in successfully implementing Communote into your enterprise as a third and final step.

We are pleased to announce the following new features and bugfixes:

- Time Zones Support
- “Read More” functionality for long notes (>300 character)
- Resend User Registration E-mails upon Request
- new “@” icon
- Tag Filtering Bug Fix
- Fixed Forward for Business Account Registration Page
- IE Browserspecific Bugfixes
- User Image Bugfix
- Performance Optimization