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.

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

Release notes v1.1.1
* Mail-In, XMPP Bug resolved
* Minor changes Public Posting
* Fix a lot of Design Issues in several browser
* Refresh note list only if first page is current

Release notes v1.1.0
* New Design
* Redesign and Rework Create Post View
* Writing notes without choosing a blog
* Tab structure for blog, all notes, @forme
* Show User profile for authors
* Thread view
* Allow answers to answers
* Inline Editing of notes
* Inline Answering of notes
* New Paging
* Permanent Links

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

Our development team used the last weeks to implement a number of feature requests and some great enhancements. The three highlights are the new auto-save function, the IP range filter and the integration to the wiki tool Confluence:

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.