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Yesterday was a landmark day for ITBrix. After 30 months of development and hard work behind the scenes, we announced the public alpha of WordFrame Integra, the quickest way to create a collaborative business website. The platform helps customers, partners, web designers, and agencies save money and time by providing standard Templates, or building blocks, for web content, search, support, community blogging, forums and more. They can pick and choose to assemble the functionality they need, and the more adventurous can use Integra's rapid development platform to create new Templates for their own solutions. A free trial license is available and anyone can try out the complete functionality by registering at the home page of this website: http://wordframe.com ...

I am kind of surprised. I am surprised that the publicly announced end of SuiteTwo earlier this month was noticed and commented by only a couple (and I really mean less than 5) online news sites. Another interesting thing was that from the bloggers and companies it was only one – Cyn.in, that acknowledged the end of this rather well funded and uncoordinated unsuccessful business effort. Cyn.in offered 25% discount for all SuiteTwo customers which may start use their services. And that was it – a couple of twitter messages which got lost in the after-the-holidays slow business activities, a couple of vague articles stressing more on the details how SuiteTwo was created, not how it ended and… that was it.

We all watched how this started in November 06. Great names – SpikeSource, SixApart, Intel Capital, Newsgator, SocialText and Tech Data at a later stage. Great names… and only about 70 customers for 27 months. And “all” those customers despite the huge marketing budget and technical and financial resources ...

Although the economic crisis is affecting everybody in our business, we still think that we should be able from time to time to take a more humorous approach to the current business conditions.

We are following the blog of Daniela Barbosa and her twitter account for some time now. Daniela has led us to the interesting blog of Beverly Macy and Karl Kasca - Teaching Social Media at UCLA. We laughed a lot at one of the articles published on their blog – it is dedicated to what the logos of several companies will be after financial crisis is gone. I am attaching the images from that post to this article.

Although we did laugh at the logos, it was a laughter through tears, actually feeling the kind of really-been-through and first-hand experienced pain. We have seen some partner and vendor companies make “necessary” and obligatory cuts in advertising, development and production budgets to be able to deal with drastically decreased sales volume and even more fierce competition. Seth Godin’s advice “in crisis like this sell and sell more” was a great call but it was too late for a lot of companies and individuals ...

Being constantly involved in the sales, promotion and implementation of enterprise social networks powered by WordFrame, I cannot help but see common mistakes and misconception regarding how a community is being built and grown. I also see these mistakes within the communities that are powered by the competitors’ social networking apps, so these are not only mistakes observed among WordFrame customers only.

There are several main issues which an enterprise must face when creating a social media community or an online open collaboration space. I will try to cover as many of these issues as possible on the WordFrame blog but I will start with two of those in this article – How do we start the community, around what, why; and the second issue being; How do we keep the community growing, evolving and at the same time, producing the results we need and expect.

Those two issues I think are important and if solved or avoided will make a lot of people happy… and more prosperous too. In a series of ...

I am opening small “brackets” between a couple of articles inspired by the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco and the BlogWorld Expo. BlogWorld Expo just finished this weekend and I am happy to report that it had more attendees than last year and the sessions this year were extremely interesting and useful for all participants.

The “brackets” I want to open refer to The Customer Support Department in any company or enterprise in general.

The customer support and the proper implementation of social media tools around it have brought quite a lot of profit and success to the sales and marketing teams of many large and medium size companies globally. WordFrame sales and support team members are promoting the idea of having the support team as being inseparable part of the marketing and sales teams for several years now. One of the ways to do this (i.e. to have your support department actively participating in the sales process as well as in the business development strategy of your organization) is to equip it with the proper communication, social media and sales tools and ….Voila!

This is quite a popular and solid saying around here. In many ways it is very true and the proper way to go about things. Well, when it comes to technology – it is quite the opposite actually. Quite the opposite!

Being at the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco proves this rule quite wrong and very difficult to follow. Any type of technology innovation or creativity require that you do not follow the ”If it ain’t broken, do not fix it” rule. We have numerous examples of failures when this rule is closely followed by technology oriented companies – let’s remember Henry Ford’s attitude towards those newer, shinier and better models back in the days… We can come up with a lot more examples like that. Fortunately our industry is the one that is not following that rule and this is why we are going ahead with larger steps than the rest of the business sectors and industries. Usually all newer gadgets and toys are presented or easily spotted on the conventions or events like the one we just attended – Office 2.0 ...

We had quite some meetings in the past couple of weeks after July 15th. Those meetings and the busy schedule were, kind of, the reason for me not to be so active both on the WordFrame blog site and on our WordFrame twitter accounts. We had some nice guests, partners and customers visiting us in Colorado Springs.

Vicki Tambellini from Synergy3 kind of started this very nice and productive sequence. She visited us with her husband and stayed for a couple of days with us. This visit gave us all the chance to go over different business aspects of our current and future partnership. We also discussed quite extensively some key details of what the communities Synergy3 is building specifically for the education sector. We outlined what these communities will require and where we all have to stress regarding functionality and planning towards this current WordFrame v1.5 we all use now as well as the upcoming WordFrame v2.0. The specific functionality and features needed for the education industry certainly require quite a lot of heads to get together and come up with the best solution from any possible aspect – usability, functionality, feature availability and business logic ...

I have been away from writing in the WordFrame blog for some time. I apologize to all our readers, customers and fans but we really had a lot to cover these past 4 weeks. We are just approaching major releases for our most important product – WordFrame Platform v1.5 

The most important thing that is really changing the game for us is getting on board a couple of new and important communities from our partners in US (Synergy3) and UK. These new communities are directed towards specific niches in the Higher Education sector. They are unique, one of their kind, and present functionality and features that have existed just in the imagination of any university administrator or higher ed vendor company. We really started helping people get their goals met.

Social Media is becoming a real tool and powerful business and product development element each and every day. Social Media creates conversations. They are started and kept alive (if properly managed) using tools like WordFrame. Those tools can ...

I had a nice picture from Australia yesterday. Des Walsh, our Australian partner sent it to me. The picture is from the Gold Coast beach near Brisbane. Well, you will see that the picture does not have the magnificent and beautiful beaches and scenery of Australia but something completely else – it has some schematics and drawings of how the new WordFrame v2.0 Enterprise Platform is built and works.

I was so happy to see this type of effect on our partners made by the latest WordFrame v2.0 demos and discussions. I can assure you that once the first demo was over about 10 days ago there was nothing else in discussion with our partners and sales people for over a week. There was only one topic in the agenda – what WordFrame v2.0 is and what effect will it have on all our existing customers and prospects. All the attendees immediately saw that we are not talking about mere interface changes and cosmetics improvements on the existing WordFrame platform but we see a fundamental change in the entire architecture, functionality, development platform and business offering ...