Go beyond forum software.

Conversations Everywhere

Customer forums are commonly found as part of an organization's larger public web experience. Although many companies highly customized their forums to mimic the look and feel of their other web properties, the forum itself usually operated within a silo with little to no interaction with other web content. The result was an effective, but disjointed, experience for the customer.

With Clearspace's unique Community Everywhere capabilities, discussions no longer live outside of the larger web experience. With Community Everywhere, companies can embed discussions within existing web properties creating a ubiquitous community experience. The result is a richer experience for end users and increased involvement in the overall community.

Rating of users and content

With traditional forums technologies, users were rated based on how many posts they made to the forum. With this system, it was easy for other users to see who the leading community members were just by looking at their score. However, just because a person posts a tremendous amount of content doesn't mean he or she is an expert. Often times the reality is the complete opposite.

Clearspace ships with a robust and flexible ranking and scoring system. Users are no longer rated simply by the amount of posts they make. They are rated by the type and quality of their interactions within the community. For example, if a user answers a question correctly they are provided more points than if they simply offered an opinion on a topic. Using this system, the true experts within the community will emerge.

More than just a discussion forum

Discussion forums are an essential part of the Clearspace platform and they are integrated throughout the user experience. However, often time a discussion thread is not the best way to deliver a message or foster collaboration between users. That is why Clearspace Community offers complete blogging and wiki-style collabroative document editing. With these technologies users have a choice of mediums they can leverage to communicate and collaborate with their peers. Moreover, these technologies are not separate within the community. They are tightly connected allowing discussions to be added to blogs, documents to be created from discussion threads and more. The result is a fluid environment where the best ideas, answers and topics quickly surface to the top of the community.

Create trust between users

The most important concept in enhancing collaboration and participation within a community is trust. Even with robust scoring and ranking algorithms, users still have to take other users' answers and opinions on faith. In a community, users are represented by what they create. That is why Jive allows users to quickly view and track all of another community member's activities with a single click. This open experience allows users to quickly identify another member as someone they can trust and collaborate with. The result is increased interaction between users fostering more detailed conversations and promoting new and unique ideas.