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.

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.

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.

- 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 v1.1.0
* 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

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.