Communote will be presented at Cebit fair in Hannover from March 3rd to 8th 2009. We choose the brand new Webciety area for this years presentation of products & services from Communardo. You will find us in Hall 6, G60 (T1.04). One of our main exhibits will be Communote and its applications within enterprises.

Communote will also be part of a presentation of Dirk Röhrborn on “Microsharing im Unternehmen: Wie Dokumentieren und Lernen Teil der täglichen Arbeit wird” at the “Learning & Knowledge Solutions” forum on wednesday, March 4th at 1 pm in hall 6 / B 34.

If you would like to meet us at Cebit please get in touch with us via e-mail or twitter.

Do you need a free ticket? Please let us know. We have a limited number of tickets available for you. We look forward to meeting you in Hannover.

We are going to launch the beta of Communote’s enterprise version for use in companies and institutions at the Microblogging conference MBC09 on Friday.

The enterprise account allows companies to set up their own microblogging universe: invite and activate your collegues to your Communote. Create and share an unlimited number of microblogs: e.g. for each topic/project/unit one microblog with its own rights management settings.

The enterprise version comes with LDAP support, user management and all the useful functions from the personal version: tagging, filtering and secure RSS.

You will need an activation code to access the beta. You can grab one at mbc09 and start trying enterprise microblogging with Communote immediately after verification. We will need to use these codes to control the server load in the early phases of operations.

If your are going to Hamburg for MBC09 watch out for Martin & Dirk from the team and for the Communote minicards. If you cannot be there just ask us for your personal activation code or register at www.communote.com.

Please give feedback or ask for help: you can reach us via Twitter (@communote) and Email (martin@communote.com).

The main features of Communote have been implemented for quite some time now. We are excited about the improvements in our own communication behaviour because of our internal use of Communote for the last 3.5 months now. And there is a successful beta test running. Naturally, all this activity has  brought up quite a number of issues, bugs and new ideas. Thank you all so much for your helpful comments. Our development team “kenmei” has been busy working on these issues during recent weeks. There is this stage in every software development process and now we are right into it. As we want to present a robust and well-tested final product to our costumers it will take a few weeks more.

Furthermore, we are about to finish a major development step for Communote. Very soon, you will be able to register for an enterprise account of communote that provides your company or team with your very own, totally separated installation of Communote. Also, development of the Communote mobile client and XMPP interface implementation is making good progress. Please stay tuned for more news about this topic.

As the technical development goes on we are going to increase our community activities. For this reason there will be more blog postings and twitter updates. You can reach me as your community manager also via email to martin(at)communote.com.

There was a valuable feedback last week via Twitter that our beta testers feel lonely. The background for this is the deactivation of public (visible/writable to all) postings by default for security reasons. Now we have at least one public microblog with introductions and hints in the beta testing zone. Beside of that we are working on a demo version with real-life use cases inside.

Finally we are working on website improvements. Very soon, registering with Communote will become easier and there will be a convenient way to send feedback to the team.

This is how Communote looks like:

We are very excited to announce that Communote will be launching public beta-test this Friday. Thank you very much for registering at our website and for your patience. Our Communote development team has been very busy during the last months to complete the first version of our microblogging and microsharing service. Many hints from about 40 pilot users have been included that have been using and testing Communote during their daily business since early October.

Now it is your turn. Public registration will be opened at www.communote.com this Friday, 5th December 2008.

We would like to invite you to learn more about Communote in one of our live-webinars at www.communote.com on Friday:

• In German: 05 Dec 2008, 03:00 pm CET (local time in Germany)
• In English: 05 Dec 2008, 12:00 am EST (New York), 09:00 am PST (California), 05:00 pm GMT (London)

In this webinar we would like to present the Communote services to you. Further, you will have the chance to get all your questions answered via live-chat or twitter (@communote).

To participate in the webinar please go to www.communote.com at the time mentioned and follow the instructions from there.

We are looking forward to welcome you on Friday. Please feel free to contact us via e-mail or twitter (@communote) if any questions should arise.

During the last months we at Communardo have experimented a lot with social software – and in fact also through the last 7 years before. Wikis, blogs & co. have played a mayor role in our customer engagements (e.g. for Intranet 2.0) but also in our internal IT-landscape. Especially, in our own practice we sense a rising demand to professionalize the use of micro-content like short messages, notes, hints & tipps, hyperlinks. E-mail, instant messaging and personal folders are just not the right place to store these bits of information with stedily growing importance.

The idea, just to use twitter or some kind of logged instant messaging is equally charming but not suitable. Whereas the strength of twitter.com lies in the building and up-keeping of social and professional networks an in PR and marketing it is – at least in our opinion – not really usable for enterprise use. Instead of following a people-centric approach (“follow”) we are focusing on topic-centric communication. We think that this suites better the needs in our business world. We need at least some amount of order and structure just as we need discretion and access control and persistent storage of content. This is what we miss at twitter.com and its accompanying services.

This is the reason why a team of software engineers at Communardo has started a project to develop an own microblogging platform. We have been inspired by first tests of project blogs based on wordpress with the Prologue Theme and by the possibilities of Ajax & Co. in the frontend as well as Java in the backend to build a company-wide communications platform that allows for topic-centric microblogging.

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