ConnectElements is rolling out its premium subscription plan starting today. First, I want to say thanks to all those who have created projects on ConnectElements – all those existing project owners will receive a free premium upgrade for one year! If we missed you, just let us know. While we always advertised ConnectElements as charging a fee, we’ve never once done so until now.

Here’s the details:

Anyone can sign up for ConnectElements.com for free and start using the basic collaboration plan. Later, when you need more groups and projects, you can upgrade your account to a paid plan. Regardless of the plan you choose, you’ll also get access to your groups and projects using our upcoming mobile app.

• Basic membership is free and lets you start collaboration groups and participate in any number of projects. Groups are enabled with activity streams, blogs, wikis, photos, calendars and more. You can be invited to projects, though you can’t create projects.
• Premium membership additionally lets you start unlimited projects. Projects are fully enabled with group collaboration features and project management features like deliverables, tasks and issue tracking. As a project manager you invite others to freely participate in your projects and transfer control of your projects to other subscribers. Your projects switch to readonly without a premium membership.

As a special offer, plans are cheap – a premium membership is just $5 per month. The first time you try and create a project, you’ll be asked to signup.

You can see a comparison of the plans for more information.

We hope you enjoy the work we’ve put into ConnectElements over the last few years and we think you’ll like the new mobile app when it becomes available.

ConnectElements.com is based on Concursive's ConcourseConnect software. You would consider several options from Concursive if you wanted to have your own community with groups and projects… or social communities to support topics you are interested in. ConcourseConnect is very flexible in the types of data it supports, and there is a mobile API to quickly launch apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Here's what's new at ConnectElements.com:

Each user profile is now set to a "Friends Only" privacy setting. The setting can be changed and this setting allows users to determine with whom they want to share their personal activity stream, blogs, photos, videos and documents with. Most users should use a Group for sharing, though for corporations and large businesses using ConnectElements.com your user profile is a good place to write your status updates. Users can control their privacy settings by going to their Settings page.

The Photos module has an improved layout, bigger images and photo likes and comments.

Links to Videos on YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites can be added in the Videos module.

The Project Tasks module has received minor updates to sort tasks by priority and business value. This sophisticated task manager is one you should experiment with to learn all the ins-and-outs.

The Documents module has been improved with an online document viewer for several document types, including: PDF, Excel, Powerpoint and Word. Documents can also be placed into folders and their is a new document folder viewer for navigating the folders.

The Calendar module has been updated with an improved look and additional features. Calendar events have additional fields: details, registration and tickets URL links. Documents and images can be attached to calendar events. The timezone is shown on calendar times.

There's a new feature to send emails to all members of a Group or Project. Messages use HTML for additional text styles and formatting. Messages are now recorded to a user's Messages module. The user Messages module has also been improved. These private messages now use HTML instead of plaintext and users can search their own messages. A "Reply to All" feature has been added.

We continue to improve the Wiki functionality and maintain compatibility with the latest browser versions. Wiki images can be resized in the editor by dragging their handles.

Across the board, images are now rendered at higher resolutions and look great on Retina and high resolution capable displays.

When users choose to receive email updates concerning their groups, projects and associates, the content of the email is now organized by content type. This has proven to be more effective when dealing with lots of projects.

We've taken some first steps at improving the search results – quicker and context sensitive results – though more improvements will be coming soon to correct the "related" search results.

You'll find other tweaks and fixes throughout.

Finally, we're working on making a Timesheet capability available (actually bringing over an existing timesheet capability from ConcourseConnect) and will make it accessible in a future update. Advanced users can contact me for more information on trying it sooner.

Welcome to the first update of 2012!

Today's update includes major new features across every module.

For starters, we've tweaked the project profile so that when you start a new project these modules are included:

• Activity Stream: The robust ConcourseConnect activity stream displays all of your communication with real-time updates.
• Status: Using a blog capability, users can post project status updates.
• Photos: An improved image processor now optimizes the user's photo viewing experience and the photo uploading now allows for batch uploading of files.
• Videos: Share Youtube videos and the video data is automatically populated; a popup viewer allows users to easily watch posted videos. Video data is populated from Vimeo and Ustream too!
• Calendar: We've made it easier to add calendar events and invite users by email.
• Wiki: The wiki editor has been greatly improved and now there is an automatic table of contents for each wiki page.
• Q&A: The discussion forum has been revamped from the ground up to provide easier navigation and topic viewing.
• Documents: An improved document management experience keeps things simple.
• Deliverables: This is the project plan itself which you can build online or from external sources like Microsoft Project files and OmniOutliner files.
• Tasks: All new drag and drop task management geared towards agile users. The task manager allows you to track the flow of tasks, their assignments, business value and more.
• Issues: Track issues as they arise and the new notifications will keep you alerted to them.
• Members: Inviting members to your projects is easier because you can invite them from your groups and from CSV files.
• Projects can now act as templates and be cloned.

Update (Dec 2013): this app has been replaced with a dedicated ConnectElements app.

Users of ConnectElements.com can now download the ConcourseConnect Mobile application and login to ConnectElements! The App runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The App lets you read the latest posts from your groups and projects including status updates, blogs or even wikis, directly from the mobile device. You can browse your connections, like people, groups and projects and post a status update to them too. This is just version 1.0 of the mobile app, so we need your feedback in making it better. Future additions may include support for Android and Blackberry.

Please take a look and if you like it then please give the app a nice review!

Today we're announcing several new features to the site.

The goal of ConnectElements.com has always been to bring people together for collaboration in the simplest way possible. There are no 'business silos' where an administrator at a business has to manage a corporate system. With ConnectElements.com, users have the power to form groups and start projects themselves, as we call it, in a flash!

The social business benefits from a reduced cost of business, faster resolution turnaround, an increase in customer satisfaction and an increase in repeat customers.

Here are the highlights of today's upgrade:

Streamlined Invitations