CubeTree Wins Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad!

Thanks to everyone for your support in voting for our video submission for the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad, and getting us to the finals – we’re thrilled we won!

As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad is produced by TechWeb, the folks who produce Enterprise 2.0 Conference and Web 2.0 Expo, and is a competition that lets companies present their innovative application (either in development and about to launch, or recently launched) to the Enterprise 2.0 community. The LaunchPad was part of the Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference, which is usually held in Boston but making its San Francisco debut this past week.

All the finalists did a five-minute main stage pitch to the entire conference audience and the winner was decided by audience vote. Carlin talked about the five reasons to love CubeTree, followed by a short demo. Read here what Paige Finkelman, the LaunchPad ChairPerson, had to say about CubeTree and the other contestants.

Vote for CubeTree on the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad

For the past few years, we've been attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference, consistently one of the best places to see what's new and compelling in enterprise collaboration and communication. Normally held in Boston, this year it's going to be in full swing in San Francisco from November 2nd through 5th.

Several of our customers are already slated to speak at the conference, and now CubeTree has been chosen to play a part as well: We're excited to announce that we've been shortlisted as one of the finalists for the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad!

If we win, CubeTree will take the main stage and present to the entire conference. But we could really use your help getting us there. How? Well, the next step in the selection process is based on popular vote - and every vote counts! So please take a few minutes to check out our video and vote for CubeTree. And thanks for your support!

The Snow Leopard of Releases

The last two weekly releases at Cubetree have been HUGE, but in an under the iceberg sense.

Learning from our good friends at Apple and their Snow Leopard release - sometimes the most valuable thing we can do in software is make the features we already have better.

Therefore we've spent the last two weeks improving the reliability and quality of the service. This includes:

• Continued investment in making the site disaster proof and geographically redundant with our second data center site in Virginia, USA.
• Preparing to go global with multi-language support.
• Specific customer bug fixes from the feedback forum

... and streamlining internal processes for deploying and managing our site.

We've also got a few new features in development with customers in our Trusted Enterprise Program (email support@cubetree.com, to join the Trusted Companies List). And we'll be releasing those to being generally available in the next a few weeks.

All New- iPhone Upgrade and Wiki Features!

Upgrade For Your iPhone

Yesterday the update for the cubetree iPhone application became available in Apple's App Store! This is a major upgrade and includes improvements to existing features and entirely new functionality, such as...

New Feed Home Page

The home page has a UI upgrade with a new, cleaner design. The feed now also shows all types of feed items (just as you would see on the website or cubedeck desktop client).

Improved Photo Viewing

We've upgraded the experience of adding and viewing photos into your network on the iPhone.

Many users use their iPhones to post pictures from around the office or around town. This includes snap shots of architectural diagrams from white boards, conference booths, or customer visits. Starting in this release, we've added a progress bar to mark time while your photo is being uploaded.

Additionally, once added to the network, you can click on a photo in the feed to view a close up of the photo. Now you'll be able to zoom in, zoom out, and scroll around the image using the touch screen.

Action Items on the iPhone

We've made action items easily accessible with a menu button on the iPhone. You can click on the Action Items button at the bottom of the application to see your currently assigned action items.

You can also assign an Action Item from the iPhone by navigating to a user's profile and clicking the "+" button in the top right-hand corner.

Four Wiki Features You Requested

Users regularly request new features for cubetree's wiki using the feedback forum. For this week's release we added four of the most commonly asked for features.

1. Moving Wiki Pages From Private to Public

Users want to privately iterate with their teams on planning documents and then easily share a final version with the company. You can do that now by working on a wiki page in a private group and then moving it into a public group or your profile.

To move a wiki page you've created, view the page and click on Move Page link in the left-hand menu.

2. Edit Wiki Page HTML

The page editor is great for adding embeds and bolding text, but users have been asking for the ability to get their hands dirty and directly edit the HTML content of their wiki pages.

Starting in this release you can directly edit wiki pages HTML by going to the edit page for a wiki page and then clicking on the edit source icon.

3. Keyboard Shortcuts

Starting in this release we've added support for Keyboard Shortcuts. When you edit wiki pages you can now use the keyboard to modify the wiki page. For example, highlight text and click Ctrl-B to make the text bold, underline text by hitting Ctrl-U, and so forth.

You can see all the key combinations by editing a wiki page, then clicking the Help Icon in the Edit menu.

4. Edit Links In Wiki Pages

Wiki pages tend to be full of links to other wiki pages and external sites. In order to improve the usability of creating wiki pages, we've made it easy to edit existing links in wiki pages.

When you edit a page, click on a link in the page and then click on the link button in the toolbar. It will bring up the link dialog box with fields pre-filled.

Always Available.

The cubetree service has become core to how many companies and teams run their business. It's become critical that the cubetree site is available regardless of natural disaster or regional Internet outage.

To provide that quality of service, this week we've upgraded our underlying technology stack to run the site even when unexpected disasters strike.

Disaster Recovery Means Always Available

Websites are physically hosted in data centers. Many web sites can only be hosted in one data center and if that data center is disabled (see Godzilla), the service is no longer available on the Internet.

Disaster Recovery (or "DR") is a way of adding reliability to hosted services by delivered the service from multiple data centers.

This week we upgraded our underlying technology and processes to support DR and deliver our service from multiple data centers. This improvement allows us to deliver the service even if a disaster removes one data center from having access to the Internet.

Users won't see any change and cubetree will continue to run as they'd expect. The improvement is that the next time there is a large Internet outage, the cubetree service will continue to function.

Trusted Company Program

Every week we release a set of features as Generally Available (GA) to all of the companies which use cubetree. For example, TechCrunch'sDaniel Brusilovsky recently wrote about our latest feature moving to being GA.

Each week we also make a set of beta features exclusively available to set of "Trusted Companies." Trusted Companies get early access to features and their feedback shapes the product design before it is made available to everyone.

We are currently working on some large features, similar in scale to the group chat, and we are expanding the Trusted Company program to get more feedback. If your company would like to join the Trusted Company group, please send us an email to support@cubetree.com.

Group Chat Built Into Your Enterprise Social Network

This week's release adds an entirely new way to communicate inside your enterprise social network -- real-time group chat rooms.

Group Chat As Part of Your Enterprise Social Network

Group chat is a feature that you can use for multiple people to instant message together in one shared "chat room."

Adding group chat to CubeTree was inspired by a customer who runs support for a Fortune 100 company. The company uses a tiered support system to answer product questions from their customers. Success for the support team means answering customer questions correctly, as fast as possible, and with the least expensive tier of support.

The support teams could already search their CubeTree network to find product experts to answer questions. But once the right set of experts were identified, it was difficult to get prompt help on a problem. Their options were...

• to send an email to a list of experts... but there was no guarantee any of them would be available to respond
• to call experts until one was available... but the product experts might be in widely different time zones or might not be at a computer.

All of this becomes particularly difficult when a problem might require multiple experts working together to find a solution. What this team required was...

• support for many product rooms (e.g., one for each product) where experts know to be available to answer questions when they are online.
• a real-time chat for the support team to ask questions and get help instantly.
• a record of previous questions/answers that can be searched to address future support questions.

This is what we are delivering with CubeTree's group chat.

It's Easy to Create and Find Chat Rooms

Starting in this release, when you are logged into Cubetree there is an application bar at the bottom of your browser window. The application bar will show you currently active chat rooms.

You can click to easily join a chat room or create a new room.

Inside A Chat Room

When you join an existing chat room, you can see the historical conversation before you joined and all the participants.

The chat room is real-time and you can easily chime into the discussion with an instant message to the group.

You can invite new participants to the group in one click or send the chat room URL to co-workers via email.

Chat Rooms Can Be Private Or Public

Each group in CubeTree gets their own chat room by default. To enter a group's chat room, go view the group and click "chat" in the left-hand menu.

The group chat is only available to members of the group and follows the group's privacy setting.

• If the group is public, anyone in your company can join.
• If the group is private, only invited group members from your company can join the chat.
• If the group is a private "cross-company" group, only invited group members can join. Depending on your usage this may by IT consultants, beta customers, supply chain partners, etc.

Search Chat Room Transcripts

Group chat conversations are saved as "transcripts." The transcripts can be searched, but again follow the privacy controls depending on the group where they were created.

In Addition to the Group Chat...

We also released:

• An upgrade for the wiki to automatically save wiki page drafts as you edit ... so you never lose an page changes if your browser unexpectedly quits

• Added action items to groups ... so you can assign tasks to members of your work group

• and a slew of other bugs fixes ... because you asked for them in user feedback!

Giving More Customer Feature Love

This week's release was full of upgrades to existing features based on your user feedback.

Document Versioning and Editing

Users upload documents to CubeTree for lots of reasons into lots of places. For example

• Product owners post PowerPoint presentations to their profile ... so sales and support can get notified of the latest roadmap updates without getting another email
• Project managers post their Excel task lists into a group for their project team ... so anyone that wants visibility on projects status can follow the group to see the latest
• Account managers are sharing large documents with customers inside cross-company groups ... so they can share documents without overwhelming corporate email inbox limits

What do all of these use cases have in common? They get better when you can version and manage your documents once you've uploaded them. So this week we did an upgrade to documents uploading so that ...

• 
  You can do version management of documents -- To update a document, go into a list of documents in your group or off your profile. Click on a specific document and you can choose to upload a new version.
• You can edit document details -- When you view an uploaded document you can edit the name and description of the document.
  

Reply To Comment Emails Directly From Your Phone (or other email client)
Whenever someone comments on your content, CubeTree (by default) sends an email. In the past, to reply with your own comment you had to click on a link in the email and go back to the website.

Starting this week, you can simply reply directly to the comment email and your response will be captured in your feed.


We also did a nice upgrade to the comment email itself to include the full conversation from a comment feed and stylize the content.


Route RSS and Google Feed Items Into Groups
CubeTree provides 14 different integrations which create feed items triggered by events from third-party systems. Users have been asking for the ability to create those feed items in a specific group. Starting in this release, you can setup several of the integrations to create feed items within specific groups.

RSS Feed Integration lets you import RSS feeds into specific groups.

For example, now you can create a competitive marketing group and add a RSS feed integration to twitter search, which creates feed events each time your competitors are mentioned.


Google Docs Integration lets you create feed items whenever a Google Doc is created or edited from a folder you specify.

For example, some users have a folder in Google Docs for each of their customer's projects. They can now setup an integration to publish from a specific Google Docs folder into a cross-company group being used to share updates with the customer.


Google Reader Integration creates feed items whenver you "share" a link using Google Reader.

For example, some customers have setup an optional group to share links. If you want to see what your co-workers are reading, you follow the group and it's got all the links shared through everyone's Google Reader.