New Features at ConnectElements.com for April 2013

Posted by Comm R on April 5, 2013 9:00 AM EDT

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.

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Comments

Thanks for this update, Matt. I think ConnectElements has great potential to be competitive with some Web collab platforms out there like Huddle, SocialText, Podio, TeamLab etc. The profiles, blog and wiki support are very strong and stable. There is one item I'm particularly confused about. It's what you call the "Project Tasks module" since the terminology used there is "layout" and working with tasks is either minimalistic or non-existent. Could you shed some light on that for me please?

Another observation is that you use a module called "List". It took me a while to understand how it works but I eventually figured out that it was a starting point to link to items on the site as the button "Add to my lists" in the Groups page facilitates. What I would like to kindly propose is to morph it into a bookmarking tool (or bookmark manager module), which would be quite useful to share bookmarks with others on the site. It's not clear that this could be done presently with this tool but to build on it seems to be a plausible idea.

Finally, I would like to also recommend that you feature a personalized login page with "highlights" of the latest activity within the site. It's like a cross between a home/landing page, bulletin board, newsfeed and login box. That's missing on all the current commercial tools even for paid customers. It's just a thought though.

Very best,

James

James Leveille

1 decade ago

ConnectElements