Discourse - Team Collaboration for your LinkedIn Professional Network

Discourse 2.9 - Responsive UI

2012-03-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

Today we have released the best version of Discourse to date - 2.9!

Major feature is the new responsive UI that adjusts to the screen resolution or device that you are using to access the system.

Below you'll see screens of Discourse on iPad and iPhone (this looks similar to the screen on Windows Phone 7.x and Android devices).

iPad version of our interface

iPhone version of our interface

We have also fixed a lot of bugs in the system, improved usability and added attachment and edit feature for messages.

Now you can add attachments while posting a message. Files are automatically put into Files folder - you can even choose specific collection for them!

In details view of the message you now can edit its content

Enhance your Business Page on Facebook with Discourse 2.6!

2011-12-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

We will start 2012 with a big bang - new release of our software!

This post will describe first of the big changes that we have introduced in Discourse 2.6

Discourse for Facebook (public beta) - The best add-on for your business page on Facebook!

Why we have created this Facebook integration? Because there is no way to have a private & secure communication channel with your fans on your fan page today. Because there is such a great opportunity for turning Facebook into a great sales & support channel for business and turn your fans into actual happy customers!

You can start using our Facebook integration right away. Just jump to your workgroup settings (maybe makes sense to create special workgroup to support or sell to your Facebook fans?) and click on the Facebook logo.

First customize your Fan Page welcome view:

Next step is just to select Fan Page on which you want to install Discourse.

Below you can see a Fan Page landing page sample - you can choose your own logo and welcome text - we let you put there HTML so customization can be pretty deep. Below you will see sample landing page - on our own Fan Page

So you probably want to know how Discourse looks like for your customers?
Take a look at this beautiful way of exchanging files, pictures, messages, comments and tasks with your clients (click on the image to make it bigger).

Next up - we will describe:
New Notifications
iPhone app (private beta)
Workgroup navigation with All Workgroups view

Stay tuned & Happy New Year!
Discourse Team.

Private Communication with Your Brand Fans on Facebook

2011-12-20T04:45:00.000-08:00

Got a fan page on Facebook with thousands or tens of thousands of fans there? So what do you do with sales leads that you generate there. Or customer requests? Do you have a prive space to discuss problems or opportunities with your fans?

NOW YOU HAVE!

Discourse is opening closed beta program for brands that would like to engage their fans in private conversations on Facebook.

You can share files, documents, tasks, messages and custom updates in private and secure workspace - only with hand picked person - upon his/her request.

Everything that you share there is visible only to invited people!

You can store whole conversation history in our system as well as additional information about your customers.

Your customer can invite additional people from his side - you can as well if it's necessary.

Do you want to be part of our Beta program?

Just go to our Facebook page and sign up thru our private and secure workspace!

WTF is NPS??

2011-10-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

Last week we've been discussing concept of EgoDollars - how you can employ this concept to promote your products using your most influential users. Today I would like to talk a little bit about NPS - Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter Score can help you understand how many people would like to recommend your product and how many people would not only not recommend your product but also actively tell their friends to use something else.

If you connect both concepts (identification of most influential users and checking their attitude towards your product) can result in very powerful knowledge of whom should you target and ask for reference or ask why he/she don't like the product.

How to check your NPS?

Simply build a survey and ask your users! You can embed your survey into your Discourse workspaces (i.e. right after login ask your users to select one of the numbers in a neat modal box). We will store this information in our system and will show you the results in a neat report (let us know if you would like to have access to this feature!).

Calculating your NPS is very easy - get percentage of people who selected number 0 to 6 and percentage of people that selected 9 and 10. Subtract your detractor percentage from your promoter percentage. The result is your score.

Ideal score is of course 100 (100% of people select 9 or 10 and 0% of people select anything else).

This should be your ultimate goal, but of course we all know that it's pretty much impossible to achieve.

Anyway - we wish you good luck! Remember - Discourse can help you significantly increase your customers engagement and satisfaction! :)

Google Docs integration is coming!

2011-10-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Very soon you'll be able to attach your Google Docs documents to Discourse workspaces!

Got $0 marketing budget? Make it 10.000 with EgoDollars!

2011-10-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Economy is not getting any better. If you have a marketing budget today, chances are that it'll be slimmer tomorrow and completely vanish in a week from today.

Got a few minutes? Read on to learn on how to improve your budget with a new kind of currency - currency that is completely immune to inflation or depreciation - meet EgoDollar.

An Andertoons Cartoon

What is EgoDollar?

In 1999 I had a meeting with a guy who was an Open Source evangelist for SGI. He told me about a very easy to understand concept of EgoDollars to explain why people work on OpenSource projects. They don't get paid in "real" money. They get paid in EgoDollars - the more prestigious projects or harder from technical perspective problems they solve, the better their EgoSalary is.

Super simple.

But I'm sure that you will not be surprised that you have people among your customers who want to be paid with EgoDollars as well, right? I mean a typical customer is looking for Dollars - like discounts, special offers or gifts. But there is a special type of user that would be even happier to get EgoDollars payout instead of a discount!

How can we tell which customers want to be paid in EgoDollars?

Identify Alfa Males/Females

First you have to identify which of your users have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other social network. If you use Gmail you can use Rapportive.

If you use Discourse you know that we select and let you link your customer's profiles from external sources like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Currently we are testing on more thing - we use LinkedIn integration to get hold of Twitter user name of your client or prospect. Then we scan Klout for influencer information and we give you a list of Alpha Clients sorted by Klout influential score (it's a private beta feature - want to join? Shoot me an email to smartupz@smartupz.com).

If you have a list - the rest is pretty simple:

1. Make those users happy
2. Ask for reference
3. Make it easy to share info about your product

Let's go thru the list and see how we can achieve those steps.

Make your Alpha Users happy!

Paying in EgoDollars takes some discipline and a little bit of investment. First of all you should figure out which items have highest EgoDollar value. For us this works pretty well:

Access to private beta of upcoming release
One-to-One skype calls to get feedback about new features
Giving extra storage and/or user licenses for $0

You'll be surprised how well this works - especially the first point.

Ask for reference

Your Alpha users will be happy to share your product feedback with you and not only with you. Easiest way to ask them for reference is to ask three questions:

Who is an ideal customer for our product?
Do you know anyone who could benefit from using our product?
What you tell them?

Answer to your last question would be your reference quote.

Make it easy to share info about your product

I know it's a cliche but let's face it - you need those "like", "share" and "follow" buttons and you need to drive attention of your users towards them.

In Discourse we store customer reference quotes with their profile information (again - private beta feature). We present those quotes to the users that are among "influenced_by" or in social graph with our Alpha Clients. Makes biggest impact.

SSL for everyone!

2011-10-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

New workspace layout for external users

2011-09-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

External users will see this engaging, branded workspace interface.

New release expected on 3rd of October!

2011-09-29T00:52:00.000-07:00

Just a small preview... We will launch Discourse 2.9 very soon now!

Pimp-up your email communication!

2011-05-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

Discourse wants to help you to significantly improve your customer communication, free you from your email chaos and at the same time help you get organized - control your tasks, and stay on top of your Sales Opportunities and Projects.

We are helping you also look even more professional. Right now each email update has your logo and your picture (avatar).

Let's see how it will look like to your customer to receive a new file notification - with your branding, file thumbnail, links to the file and to the File section of the workspace.

Now let's see how it looks like when you add a message or a comment in the system:

Discourse Info Pack

2011-05-10T01:53:00.001-07:00

Discourse Info Pack

View more presentations from Smartupz.

Group Messaging for Business

2011-03-29T04:01:00.000-07:00

Email is a great tool. But it's often very complex relationship that we have with this service. It's very "love & hate" mixed together in different proportions - depends on the scenario we are using the service.

There is one scenario where we hate email a lot - business communication with groups of people. It's almost imposible to keep up with the threads. Messages, questions, attachments and tasks are mixed together. It gets worse when you use email to communicate with different project teams that are outside of your organization (i.e. your customers).

Aren't Project Collaboration tools like Basecamp already solving this problem?

In theory yes - but there are couple of unsolved issues.

1. Typical project collaboration tool doesn't work when you have many projects/cases/opportunities at the same time.

2. External participants (customers? partners?) are invited to the whole, often complex and ugly, project tool. They don't like the complexity. They don't like the overhead. They don't use it.

3. Most of the existing Project Collaboration tools are designed in a way that does not support managing multiple projects at the same time.

We think that its time to address those issues

Group Messaging app for business should be able to create meta-threads of conversations, tasks and files shared during the project.

Email must be part of the process. Business people will never give up their email (or they will not give it up within next few years for sure).

Customer workspace (interface that your customer can see when invited to the app) should be streamlined and super clean. This should also be branded (think ad hoc extranet for your customer).

If you like this concept you can try it out here: http://www.discoursehq.com

How to setup your custom sales process in Discourse?

2011-03-03T02:21:00.000-08:00

In order to setup your own sales process you should go to Settings section of our system (you must be login as an Administrator) and then click on "Deal Phases".

Next you can add new workflow step (via "Add phase" field), remove step or change steps order by using simple navigation on the right of each list item.

You can also change the name of any workflow step if you like - just click a pencil icon!

Bonus: If you invite your customer to the shared workspace during the sales cycle (to exchange documents, tasks and feedback) he or she will see your deal status. It makes a lot of sense to keep your customer up to date with the deal status but you should make sure that wording is correct!

Facebook Messages for business?

2011-03-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

We all know that the way people communicate is rapidly changing. People love the experience they get from social tools like Facebook. But in the end almost everyone has email. Email is embedded into our mobile phones, into our personal and business workflows.

We've decided to make email integration as tight as possible and below you'll find one example of such integration.

1. Create a note or task in Discourse

2. Your customer will get an email notification - he can respond directly from his email client.

3. His email is automatically connected with the original note (we create note-comment or task-comment thread)

Bonus: you will also receive email notification that new comment was added. So you can respond via email as well! Your whole customer conversation is archived in Discourse and you have it in your mailbox.

The simplest way to keep your customers up to date during the project?

2011-02-28T05:58:00.000-08:00

We all know that projects (including sales projects that we call in our system Deals) are all about communication. Almost all project management tools let you invite your customers or partners so they can be a part of the team, but very few give you branded workspace where your customer can see "The Status".

Below you'll find short description of how to create such a project status workspace, where your customer can share files, tasks and feedback with you.

1. Create a project space and assign tasks to each member of the project

2. Invite your customer to the workspace

3. He or She will be placed in very professionally looking shared workspace with the status bar. Your customer will see only items explicitly marked as "shared". In this case all the tasks are internal, so he will see only status bar (how many of them were completed).

4. Each time you complete a task, customer can see that in his workspace. Each time you upload a mockup, ask a question or post a comment - your customer will get a notification.

5. Bonus - each update can be send as an email message. Your customer can easily answer via email and we automatically attach this email to the conversation thread.

New features: tight email integration, new shared workspace and more!

2011-02-25T14:05:00.000-08:00

We are very busy updating our beta version of Discourse V2 - below you'll find couple of new features:

1. LinkedIn and Gmail contact importing and merging. You should give it a try!

2. New redesigned version of our customer shared workspace. It's very clean and easy to use place to share files, tasks and feedback with your customers during Deals and Projects. With this tool you will quickly turn your customers into active participants of your business process!

3. Deep integration with email. You can send email with or without attachments and we will attach it to a proper Deal or Project or - if this would be a new case for you - we will create new Deal out of that email.

Discourse V2 open beta is online!

2011-02-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

Testing version (open beta) of our software is online. We are improving it couple of times a day (pushing changes to the server) - you can register on http://www.discoursehq.com for free!

Below you'll find latest and greatest features:

Forward any email to your system - we will turn it into a new deal. We'll extract attachments, body message and even assign a task so you'll remember to followup!

Import your GMail and LinkedIn contacts and create deal or project workspace with just one click!

New Disqourse version for the New Year

2011-01-07T02:13:00.000-08:00

We are busy working on the new version of our system. Our key focus points and improvements are Speed (new version would be much faster) and Flexibility (i.e. process editor).

Disqourse would be a “Facebook like” communication tool for business, where you can get employees, customers and partners to share files, tasks and feedback.

- Real-time Activity Inbox (looks like Facebook newsfeed - acts like Gmail Inbox) you can effortlesly interact with the updates, messages or files from many projects you are part of. You are always up to date.
- From a great Deal to a successful Project - turn your closed deals into projects with milestones, tasks, file sharing and budget tracking.

- File sharing space - the fastest and easiest way to send and version your business files. And get immediate feedback about them as well!
- Shared workspaces - get all the internal and external project members in one place. Manage tasks. Share feedback. Track progress.

2010 was a great year - 2011 will be even better!

2011-01-03T04:46:00.000-08:00

Smartupz had a great year! How was yours?

- Mini Seedcamp London Finals

- StartupFest - one of the winners

- ProSeed cover

- New bigger office

- Last but not least - we have over 1000 companies signed up for our service!

Disqourse on Google Apps Marketplace!

2010-11-05T03:05:00.000-07:00

Great news for Google Apps users - Disqourse is finally available on Google Apps Marketplace and you can signup with just a few clicks.

We are working on additional integrations with Google Apps as well as on significant performance improvements of our app. Stay tuned!

Disqourse v2.14 - big improvements again!

2010-10-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

In the new version of our Customer Communication and Relationship Management software we have significantly simplified our menu navigation.

Now we are supporting task delegation monitoring. You always can see who is working on the task for you and you'll see when he will finish.

For the first time you can add company message, new deal or task from one place. We call it the Omnibox (just like in Chrome). It's simply omnipotent (and will grow stronger!).

Work Stream area looks much cleaner now. We have updated both how it looks and what information it shows you. It takes only one glance now to understand what is the source of a Work Stream update, what was changed/updated and who did that.

We have changed the way you setup your deal workspace. Now it's much easier to manage your Team members, customer contacts and invitations.

Out of 250 tech companies, we've made it to the final 20 and...

2010-10-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

...we've received this great honorable mention on the StartupFest competition:

We have a big THANK YOU to all of our supporters and customers!

New Version: File management

2010-09-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

New version finally online. We have changed the whole file management functionality. Now it's more responsive, allows multi file upload and offers two views - grid view and list view.

Soon we will add file versioning and folders support.

New Version: Import/export contacts in Address Book, better Work Stream and many other improvements

2010-09-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

Contacts in Address Book - we have added easy Import/Export tool! MS Outlook optimized right now, but we will be adding new sources soon!

Now you can have group actions on customer tags in Address Book.

New Work Stream - much faster and more granular.

Smartupz as a cover story of ProSeed Magazine #3

2010-09-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

One of the pictures of our team (part of the team to be precise) taken during the session for ProSeed Magazine.