From our customers to the product

One of the best parts of being early to market with a great product is that you get to participate in a hell of a lot of customers and their real-world deployments very early in the overall market growth. At the beginning of 2008 we reached out to our top customers and asked if we could come on-site to learn more about how they’re really using our products. We had over 700 conversations with customers at the “C,” mid-level and individual contributor level to find out more about what was and wasn’t working. Their feedback was consistent and we learned a ton. One of the many things was that these companies saw Clearspace as the geopgraphic center for their company and for us to acheive success we need to focus on removing adoption barriers. So that’s what we did. Today we launch Clearspace 2.5. Here are the links to what’s new for Clearspace and Clearspace Community.

What’s new in Clearspace 2.5 video

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Here’s what’s new

1. Add new conversations to old places.

Customers told us they wanted more ways to get Clearspace functionality in places outside of Clearspace. Now you can turn on discussions on any web page. That means that inside your company, you can add dicussions to a static Intranet page or a part of your wiki. Outside your company you can turn the ordinary, social and add discussions to product pages, or any other page ripe for community.

2. Connect the dots for your Salesforce

Our new Salesforce.com integration helps your Sales people get way more perspective on their prospects. Now, when they’re looking at a record in Salesforce.com, they can not only see their own notes on the company but (assuming their running Clearspace and/or Clearspace Community) they can also see the internal conversations, blogs, people, and comments that related to their prospect. This very “situationally specific” instance, lines up your company and/or community’s social interactions and applies it’s value all at once.

3. Live in your inbox

Let’s face it, people still live in their inbox. But now, you can directly email (or carbon copy) stuff that should be a task, a blog post, a document, a discussion…basically anything you want can be emailed into Clearspace. As well, once others see your content, they can respond and you can keep everything going right from your inbox.

4. Self organize

We’ve done a ton to add super kick-ass self organization features in this release. This includes

1. New “Live Search” that breaks things out in content/people/places while you search
2. Totally overhauled (and WAY powerful people directory)
3. Twitter-like social networking (you can now follow/unfollow people, see what their working on, label them, etc).
4. Another big addition was Groups. So now folks inside a company or in a community can organize how they want to. Groups feature our super-popular widgetizable interface so that the Group owner can set things up exactly the way they want to.

5. Easiest Rich Text Editor on the Market

The engagement and adoption rubber hit the road with the Editor. If publishing a comment, a task, or a blog isn’t incredibly easy and pleasurable, people will resist using the application. We heard this loud and clear for our customers and are now happy to provide the slickest editor on the market today.

6. Global phrase replacement and easy skinning

Let’s face it, Social Software terminology is exclusive and foreign to most everyone. Not to mention that each industry and even company has it’s own lexicon. To get around this, we’ve added a tool that let’s you globally change the name of features. Now a “blog” can be a “report” and “friends” can be “peeps.

Not only are words important, so is making the application look familiar. We have two levels of look-and-feel customization:

1. Easy color picker and logo uploader allows for very fast and easy customization without knowing a single line of code.
2. Our new theme engine allows you to upload a single CSS packet and have it applied across the entire application

7. Massive speed increase

Perhaps the biggest improvement to Clearspace 2.5 is the huge amount of work we did to make it 200% faster than 2.0. That’s pretty impressive given the amount of new features that were added (nearly 200) and a big requirement in the Enterprise where performance is a very big deal. Kudos to our engineers for all this amazing work.