Weekly Release - The Wiki within your Enterprise Social Network

We do an update of the CubeTree service every week to add features, making it easier for teams to work together and deliver results.  For this week's release we put the focus on expanding your wiki by ...

Making it easier to write wiki pages

Wikis are a web-based solution that allow a group of people to easily collaborate on documents. CubeTree provides a wiki built on top of your enterprise social network, and in this release we've added features to make that a bit more simple.  We've made three changes to that end:

• Users have been asking for an easy way to see what other wiki pages link to their page, and to navigate through all of the wiki pages in their network.  We've added a list of incoming links that will appear when you view a wiki page. One click will get you to all of the connected content.
• You'll also be able to create more exciting pages using our new rich page formatting- which lets you choose fonts, font size, highlight and color text.
  
• Finally, we've added an alert that will prompt you if you navigate away from a page without saving it first.
  

Making it easier to collaborate on wiki pages

A unique strength of CubeTree's wiki comes from the fact it is built on an enterprise social network.  The network makes it easy to discover new pages because when you follow a co-worker, the wiki page changes they make appear in your feed.  For this release we wanted to make it easier to collaborate on a wiki page which you've found interesting. The additional features we've included are:

• We've added commenting to wiki pages, so you can make a comment on a document without changing its body content.
• Each time you edit a wiki page you can save a new copy of the document.  With multiple people modifying a wiki page, users can accidentally lose track of wiki page changes.  We've added "diffing" across different saved versions to easily see what content has been added, removed, and modified.

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• Users have asked for the ability to catagorize their wiki pages with tags. In this release, we've added the ability to add a tag into any document by inserting a "#tag_name".  For example, if you are writing a customer deployment guide you could add a tag for the customer (#customer name) and also a catagory tag (#deployment).  Other users can search for  the #tags or browse all the tags in the company tag list.

One thing you should do right now: Try making your own wiki page

A good first step is to create a wiki page and link it to another wiki page.  Start by logging in and going to your profile.  Click "add" next to Wiki Pages in the left hand menu.  You can create your own page with rich text, images, links to content inside and outside your CubeTree network, etc.  Then, you can start to build a related set of pages which link to one another.  When you add a link from the second page to your first page, you will see "incoming links" automatically apepar on the first page.

We are going to keep adding wiki functionality in upcoming releases.  If there is a feature you believe would be valuable, give us some feedback.

Release 5/21 - Weekly Releases Go Public

We do an update of the CubeTree service every week to add features, making it easier for teams to work together and deliver results. We launched last week (woohoo!) and for the first time are publicly posting our weekly release update.

For this week's release we're providing CubeTree on the go for iPhone users and adding customer features requested after the launch ...

Loving the iPhone with CubeTree in the App Store

We want you to be able access your CubeTree network when you are away from your office. You may have already seen the tweets, but starting this week CubeTree is available as a free application for your iPhone. You can download the app from Apple's App Store.

Using the iPhone application you can update your status, see your feed, see your groups, and look up co-workers in the mobile directory. But what you are really going to love is that you can take a photo and post it directly into CubeTree (thanks to the Facebook team for their inspiration on this one). You can even add those photos to a group in one click.

Fixing the features you told us needed to be fixed

A lot of the development we do each week is features and fixes that users ask for in feedback. For this week, we've addressed some of the issues users have reported since launch. These include:

• When posting to a group from your profile page, if you don't choose a group from the drop before you submit, you would lose your message. This has been fixed. (Original request here)
• When you first setup your twitter integration, the feed was flooded with your last dozen twitter events all at once. We fixed this to only bring in your last twitter event. (Original request here)
  

One thing you should do right now: Take a photo of your boss with your iPhone and tag them in CubeTree

The iPhone application really changes what information you add to CubeTree. You can wander the halls of your office, click photos of your team and add them to your network.

When you get back to your desk, you can tag the photo with the person's name and the photo will be attached to their profile. Give it a shot and tell us what you think.

CubeTree's Feed System

Now that launch is behind us, I'm going to write a series of longer posts about our vision and our product. I'll start off with CubeTree's feed system, because it's one of CubeTree's great product strengths.

What's a feed? Why is it so important?

In CubeTree, your feed is where you see the activities of people and things you're interested in. It's just the opposite of your inbox, because you can control what you see. You tell the system what you're interested in and only the information you want enters your feed.

5 Cool Things about CubeTree's Feed

#1 CubeTree has 30+ Built-in Feed Items

CubeTree's built-in collaboration tools are designed around the idea that generating the right feed items is critical. For example, if you create or update a wiki page, you can choose whether to generate a feed item. Here are 30+ feed items in CubeTree and we'll keep adding more:

• Status updates
• Profile - write on people's walls, change profile picture, changed your shirt color, receive a kudo, new documents, follow users, follow groups, new goals, goal changes, goal posts, new links, new photos, photo tags, new profile polls, new profile poll votes, new tracked items, new trips, new profile wiki pages, profile wiki edits
• Groups - group wall writes, group doc posts, group links, group photo posts, group poll creates, group poll votes, group wiki adds, group wiki edits
• Company - invites, employee of the month nominations, employee of the month wins, quiz answers, quiz questions
• Comments

#2 CubeTree's Feed has 14 Integrations to External Systems

We believe that people will not only want to see activities within CubeTree, they will also want to see activities in external web systems that they use everyday.

• 7 consumer product integrations: Unlike many vendors who just support integrations to consumer services via generic RSS or proprietary APIs, we support built-in integrations to consumer systems. We support integrations to 7 consumer products: Google Reader, Yahoo Delicious, Twitter, TripIt, Google Talk, Google Calendar and RSS. We've found that CubeTree's Twitter and Google Reader integrations are the most popular.
• 7 enterprise integrations: CubeTree's enterprise integrations are: SalesForce.com, WebEx, Adobe Connect, GoogleDocs, 37 Signals' Basecamp, HRIS systems and the hosted version of Atlassian's Confluence (wiki).

#3 CubeTree's Feed Gives You Total Control

Feeds are all about control and so great feed architectures give the users as much control as possible without making the system so complicated that only power users understand how to use the system. CubeTree gives you two different mechanisms to control your feed:

• Following - To add things to your feed you follow them. CubeTree allows you to follow 4 types of objects: people, wiki pages, goals and groups. When you follow a person, you'll see all the activities that person shares via CubeTree. When you follow a wiki page you'll see all updates to that page regardless of who updates the page.
• Filtering - Filtering gives you even finer-grained control over what you see when you follow people. Specifically, we have added the ability to filter out the 6 feed items that users have complained the most about. If you choose to filter Twitter messages, you'll see all the activity from people you're following except their Tweets.

#4 CubeTree lets you aggregate feed items

There are cases where a user can get a lot of similar feed items in a row. So we're starting to experiment with combining similar feed items together on the user's "My Feed". If the user wants more detail, they can click through and see more detail.

#5 CubeTree's feed supports conversations

Once your system has all these users able to see what their co-workers are doing, you want to give people the ability to have group discussions about what each other is doing. Great feed items get other users to join in and comment.

We've found that several features are necessary to have a system that encourages dialog:

• Ability to comment on any feed item (including voting in polls)
• Email notifications of comments on your threads
• Ability to address comments to particular users (in case they aren't following that thread)
  
• Make it easy for people in the organization to find the most discussed topics

We believe that these capabilities are what gives CubeTree the best enterprise feed system in the market today. While we're proud of what we've done to date, there is a long ways to go. Over the next several months, we'll be adding some new capabilities to our feed system. As always, if you have suggestions for how to improve CubeTree, click on the feedback button on the right of the user interface when you're logged in.

Out into the world...

Hello and Welcome!

My name is Carlin Wiegner. I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Cubetree. Cubetree's goal is to improve how people connect and collaborate at work. Cubetree is part social network, part wiki and part micro-blogging system.

Over the last 12 months, we have worked closely with thousands of users and hundreds of companies to refine our vision. We are constantly experimenting with new ideas, new features, and new user interfaces.

Since our first release, we have learned a lot. Some features that we thought would be popular never took off and have been removed. Features that we thought weren't important turned out to be critical. And occasionally, we discover a little nugget of gold. The feature that was never asked for but that was always needed.

Today, we are very excited to announce that Cubetree is now generally available! This release, the launch release, is our 54th release. Now anyone with a work email address can sign-up and be up and running in minutes.

If there is any way we can make our product better, please don't hesitate to contact us.

You'll be hearing more from us real soon.

Take care,
Carlin