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.

People overview

In the top menu bar you can find the tab “persons”. Inside the bar all in your Communote registered people are arranged in an alphabetically order. There you can see what people you follow. You can also use the people overview in order to change this setting.

Blog overview

Similar to the people overview you can find inside the tab “blogs ” all created blogs to which you have access. There you can also choose whether you want to follow the blog. The blogs are also listed alphabetically.

Images/video inline

Images and videos can continue to append your messages. Images are now even displayed under your text. The video (e.g. youtube, vimeo) is shown, and can be directly played  from your Communote page.

Like function

Simply click with your mouse on one of your favorite posts. Under the message appears a new menu bar. Now you can show to all other users that you like this post by clicking on “Like”. After that a heart symbol appears next to the post .

Content filtering

To retrieve more information you can specify the medium, you seek, in the content filtering. Subsequently only messages with the selected media will be displayed.

Desktop client

Using the desktop client, new posts appear on the desktop. He is linked to Communote, and works cross-platform with Adobe Air.

Further improvements

With the new Communote release there are an auto-refresh the page and a bookmarklet as well. Mobile Apps for iPhone, Android (in near future) and Blackberry are also available.

For more information, on what’s new and different functions in Communote, will be available in our updated user manual soon.

Your Feedback

We look forward to your feedback. Your thoughts and wishes are important to us. So please take the opportunity via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc., to come in direct contact with us.

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.

Communote was part of this big event. This year Communote was presented by an own homebase at Webciety. We are impressed by the variety of interesting conversations and people we have met. We are looking forward to starting further activities with our newly acquired customers.

The conference program of the Webciety 2011 true to the motto “Embracing the Digital Change – den digitalen Wandel gestalten!” contained topics as Cloud-Computing, E-Learning 2.0, Open Innovation, Social Colaboration, or Sacial Games & Marketing.

Communote was represented at the panel “Microblogging goes Microsharing”. The starting speech was made by Mrs. Gebhardt, CEO Trendbüro. From the end of 2010 Trendbüro and Avantgarde with 350 employees all over the world use Communote in a customized user interface. At the subsequent panel discussion Mrs. Gebhardt (Trendbüro), Felix Schröder (Justsoftware), Jean-Michael Vergne (blueKiwi) and me took part as experts and supliers. My statement that Communardo already is a ‘zero e-mail’ company initiated a ripple of moaning in the audience. The discussion quickly showed different views on topics like Suite, or Best-of-Bread. Because many companies already use grown Wikis and other information portals, Communote has a huge advantage of integrating possibilities (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence). The panels stream is available at www.webciety.de (Friday, 2011-03-04).

At our booth you could see lots new features live. We already showed visitors a pre-published version of our new Communote. Beside a new user interface, Communote also has many new features as auto-refresh, inline image and clip display, like buttons, and a bookmarklet for direct sharing of information.

At the CeBIT we also introduced our new iPhone app. You can easily download Communote from the app store. You can simply read messages and share information at any place.

We thank all our customers and interested parties for visiting Communote, and for all intensive conversations at the CeBIT Webciety. We are also glad about our new facebook page to stay in contact with you!

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.

A lot has happened during these 2 years. In spring and summer 2008 the initial beta version of the software was developed and finally we started private beta in early October 08. Right from the start, Communote has been used by many users not only at Communardo Software. Thanks to the great feedback that we received from our early adopters the development team was able to substantially improve Communote during the following months.

The launch of the commercial version in 2010 became another important milestone. The number of clients has since been rising steadily. We’ve been showing Communote to a great number of interested clients at trade shows and events throughout Germany. Most interestingly, we recognized an important change. In 2009 we still had to explain many people from traditional businesses what Twitter & microblogging is all about. This year, however, business people are coming around to ask how they can implement Communote microblogging in the best way to improve their internal communication. What a difference!

Even more exciting it has been for us to observe in which ways our clients are using Communote microblogging for their businesses today. Whereas project communications and internal corporate communications are very common there are also very interesting uses for sales, leadership, innovation and even as central corporate intranet and workspace for purchasing partnerships across multiple firms.

Also, scientific research has been conducted on our own internal microblogging system. Take a look at the findings, the report “Enterprise Microblogging: Procrastination or productive use” compiled by Alexander Richter and Kai Riemer is worth reading.

All these findings have also helped us to better understand the key differentiator of Communote from its competitors. Whereas many other microblogging systems, eg. Yammer etc. are mainly focusing on social networking between employess, Communote also helps “getting things done”. Look at the video, it shows how this can be done!

Thank you all, clients, users, developers, friends and critics. Your feedback and support has made Communote to what it is today. Two years in real life are equivalent to 14 years in internet life, right? So, dear Communote, you are still in adolescence. We are excited to watch you grow. By the way, there will be an anouncement of new even better versions soon…

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.