Communote is a new enterprise microblogging platform by Communardo. In our first interview for Microblogging.com, Communardo CEO Dirk Röhrborn discusses the project and his company.
Q: How does Communote differ from other enterprise microblogging platforms?
A: Microblogging covers two aspects that are important for communications in an enterprise context: messaging and information sharing. Whereas other tools concentrate on the messaging part, the focus of Communote is not only on social messaging but on its combination with enterprise microsharing. This means that storage and retrieval of important pieces of information is well supported, especially by tagging & filtering features. Furthermore, Communote offers features for content structuring in blogs and the definition of access control lists for blogs to allow handling confidential issues within Communote. The integration of Communote into other (third party) application by means of widgets, portlets and our JSON API will become key features, soon. This is what will eventually make social messaging part of many business applications.
Q: In addition to status updates, what other features does Communote offer?
A: First of all, we call our content items ‘notes’. This covers status updates but also ideas, problems, messages and many more types of micro content. Communote users can select blogs to post their notes in. A blog usually covers a current topic, a project or some other kind of collaborative activity. Within Communote users usually follow topics rather than users. Notes can be accompanied by files that can be uploaded. #Tags and @replies are supported, of course. Communote allows users to export notes to RTF files for archiving or the preparation of detailed reports. To offer secure, dynamic RSS feeds for all content, e.g. blogs, users, detailed filter settings, is also an important feature of Communote.
Q: One of the main attractions of microblogging is the ability to make status updates via a mobile device. What mobile solutions does Communote currently offer?
A: We will release a mobile client for Communote within the next few weeks. This Java-based client provides mobile users with the main features of Communote and can be used on a wide variety of mobile devices. We are currently testing the mobile client extensively to be sure to deliver a stable and proven tool to our users. I have been myself using this mobile client on my Blackberry for the last about 4 weeks now. I am really excited about the potential of mobile micromessaging and microsharing in an enterprise environment. The instant availability of important company information through the search & retrieval features of Communote combined with the speed and responsiveness of mobile messaging increases the value of mobile devices significantly.
Q: How has the reaction to the beta been, and has it met or exceeded your expectations?
A: Our enterprise beta has been up & running for about 6 weeks now. We are right in the middle of an important dialogue with our early users now – both from our online services and from companies that are self-hosting Communote internally. We are getting valuable feedback from these users that helps us improve the functionality and usability of our service further. As expected, we can observe that enterprise users that are collaborating a lot with others benefit most from the use of Communote. We are excited about the positive reactions we get and overwhelmed by the creativity of their ideas on future features of Communote that are now under development. As expected, we hear from the users that the main benefit from internal microblogging is that transparency is being moved to a new previously unknown level.
Q: What other social media tools does Communardo offer?
A: Communardo has been offering software solutions for collaboration and knowledge sharing for about 8 years now. Today, consulting and software development services for information portals as well as enterprise wiki & blogging solutions based on platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence and Liferay are important parts of our business. Our experience in this area of social media use in companies has influenced the development of Communote to a large extent. We are ourselves excited to see that the use of Communote within our own company has spread much quicker than of any other social media tool before. However, in future we will see social messaging to become part of many enterprise applications, e.g. content and document management, project management, management information systems and even enterprise resource planning. Enterprise social messaging will become a new communications infrastructure besides or combined with email that will be based on decentralized messaging services interlinked with open exchange protocols. Communote will continue to serve the enterprise needs of social messaging.
Q: When does Communote officially launch?
A: We are currently planning to launch the commercial offerings within the next 6 months from now. We will see a shift from “traditional” electronic communication that has been dominated by email so far towards enterprise social messaging. This will help tp tear down the barriers between departments and management levels even further. It’s exciting for us to be part of this development.
