Communote is much more than just an Enterprise “Facebook” or “Twitter.” Beyond the known functions of the social networks, Communote is the ideal means of communication in teams and distributed enterprises. Information can be shared in closed groups and provided with tags. So the message reaches the right audience and because of extensive filtering options, such as themes, tags , people and content types, such as documents, images, links and videos, it quickly found again.

The new features include:  Like-feature, new threaded discussions, auto-refresh, image/video inline preview, new content filters, blog overview , tag view, desktop client and iPhone app.

Another new feature is the bookmarklet. With the Communote Bookmarklet you can easily share web content with your co-workers. The shared bookmarks can be used as a knowledge base for yourself and also for the entire company.

The new Quick Start Guide helps you and your colleagues to quickly discover communote.

To assure a high level of quality, the development of the new release has taken more time than expected. We would like thank our customers for their trust and their patience. It has been worthwhile waiting since Communote now offers a completely revised user interface and many new features.

Until 30 September 2011 you have the chance to purchase Communote Licenses and Communote user credits at the current price at out online shop. From 01 October 2011 the new pricing for version 2.0 will apply.

We look forward to your feedback on the new Communote 2.0 as a comment, via Twitter or on our Facebook page.

Communote offers a wide range of applications in the enterprise. We ourselves are always thrilled by what scenarios customers come to us, and how Communote is used by our customers.

We want to introduce the use of Communote in the following areas:

Corporate Communication

„… finally I see my employees’ concerns, and can easily give new impetus to different hierarchical levels.“

Your employees are stressed out because of permanently getting new cc emails? Nevertheless, important information do not find the proper recipients?

By using Communote, you can communicate with your employees in a goal-oriented way, and open a feedback-channel for new ideas. Decisions, current issues, and statuses are transparent and clear to everyone.

This enables a more effective and more personal respond for employees. A communication of new strategies and tactical activities is created and gives new impetus.

„… within only a short time, I receive feedbacks, hints, advices, and support.“

By using Communote, networks are created beyond internal company limits and competences.

• exchange of information without any barriers and administration
• new perspectives for a company’s suggestion system
• ideas arise during ordinary work and can be discussed, and encouraged directly over there
• decisions are accelerated, and problem solving transparent for everyone
• new issues and ideas get a direct feedback
• the innovative strength is a huge competitive advantage

Sales and Marketing

„… all employees concerned do really get to know all important topics. Information does not disappear in personal email accounts anymore.“

Salesmen have a key function in your company, and are the direct link to your costumers. Unfortunately, the integration of salesmen in the company and in its specialty department is often missing.

With the help of Communote, salesmen are integrated in the company. Customers’ feedback and requirements are clearly visible. Specialty departments can better understand its customers’ requirements.

The provision of direct customer information by salesmen enables a much better customer and market orientation in your company that can help your company to yield a competitive advantage.

Communication with partners

“… partners and suppliers can be integrated into my projects as if they were on-site …”

Take Communote to work more closely with its partners in the supply chain. Integrate external workers to your projects and issues, and take advantage of the strength of informal communication.

Follow users, blogs and tags:

You can simple follow blogs, authors, tags and discussions.

With the tab “Following” you can see all notes that match your criteria “Following”. Messages that were addressed to you, are collected in the tab “@ [User]“. In the tab “Favorites ” you will find all the notes that you marked as favorites.

Send direct messages to one or more persons:

Direct messages are private messages that can be exchanged between one or more users. These messages are only visible for recipients and authors and can not be edited or deleted after sending.

Use the extended linking to e-mails:

With Communote you can communicate by e-mail as well. You can chose the e-mail notification feature in the user settings. For every ‘@’ message you will get an e-mail indicating a new message in Communote. Now this function is even more convenient.

Mail-in file attachments:
Now attachments can be sent to a Communote blog by mail as well. Simply send an e-mail with attachments to the blog e-mail address!

Attachment Link in notifications:
Notifications contain a reference to attachments followed by a list of these attachments as links. That means, you can directly open files from an e-mail.

Replies to e-mails:
If you receive a notification by e-mail, and would like to answer, then you can send by the reply function of your e-mail client (e.g. Outlook) a response to Communote. Change neither address nor the recipients of the subject. Communote receives your e-mail and converts it into a new entry. A discussion is comprehensible in this way.

LDAP user group synchronization:

In a LDAP connection you can use existing LDAP user groups in a Communote blog for rights management. To be able to rely on already existing groups, the administration of rights simplifies the management. Easily a LDAP user group can be assigned to rights in the blogs. It works as simple as permitting an individual user.

Other improvements:

updated RSS and RTF export, updated editor (TinyMCE 3.3.8), improved detection of mime types for file attachments, optimized scaling of pictures, extended date display in metadata (display weekday), performance optimization, browser optimizations.

Moreover, from now on icons for @-, direct messages and favorites will be shown below the profile picture.

Further information on improvements and different features in Communote can be found in our new user manual.

A short outlook:

Currently we are dealing with the implementation of many new ideas. You can look forward to many new Communote features soon. These include, for example Auto Refresh and the inline display of images and videos, as well as a lot more interesting functions. Concerning this we will inform you very soon.

A close dialogue with our customers is very important to us! That’s why we would like to involve you more in our product development in the next year. Your thoughts and wishes are very important. We are therefore particularly looking for your feedback.

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.

Auto-Save Functionality

There is no character limitation in Communote and so even longer information snippets can be managed there. For example many users write short meeting protocols right into their project microblog. Especially for such use cases the new auto-save functionality was designed. It makes sure that problems with your internet connection or a problem with the browser does not lead to a loss of important information: the text is saved in the background and is restored automatically.

IP Range Filter

Using this new functionality you can restrict access to your Communote to certain IP ranges. With the IP range filter you can control your company’s information flow even better.

Confluence Integration

While Communote hosts the dynamic flow of information, wikis are very good in the joint creation and editing of documents. Our new Confluence plugin connects both worlds: you can show and create Communote postings right into Confluence wiki pages. An example use case is a project wiki with wiki sites for every sub-project (for static information like team members and tasks) including current micro-postings from Communote.

Other new functionality

• automatic database updates
• extended API
• blocking of accounts after the wrong password
• Favicon
• Various bug fixes

The new features have been made available with the new Version 1.0.1.

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.

We are excited about the results of our work an the large number of possible applications that are currently beeing discussed in the enterprise 2.0 community, e.g  here and here and here. As a consequence we decided to build an online-service based on our software – communote.com.

At present we are working intensively to build a scalable multi-client internet platform. In a couple of weeks we will make communote available to those who would like to beta-test it. In the meantime, there is the possibility to register for beta-testing at communote.com.

Please follow our weblog in English (this is where you are) as well as in German at humannetworkcompetence.de und via www.twitter.com/communote where we will regularly write posts on new features, use cases and new ideas.

Communote combines many brilliant ideas from blogging, tagging and filtering. This is a first glimpse at the user interface:

Many excellent people are engaged in building communote.com. At this place a big THANK YOU to Torsten, Martin, Stefan, Ronny, Markus, Katja, Tobias, Falk, Martin, Jens, René, Niels, Daniela, Sebastian, Ilja and all those that have been working in the background to make communote happen!