Platform Enhancements

 The successful implementation of the July 23 release means these useful improvements will be present in all communities.

· Plaxo Invitation Widget – Community users and administrators can now import contacts from multiple address books directly from the community. Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail and Plaxo address books are all supported. Community, Friend, Group/Social Object and Event invitations will now include a Plaxo widget with the invitation.

· Group Bulletin Email Notifications – Group Bulletins will now automatically send email notifications to all Group Members. Users then have the ability to manage from which Groups they would like to receive email notifications.

New Features

After successful Beta testing, ThePort is pleased to announce the following features are now generally available as add-on services. If your organization is interested in further exploring implementing any of these new features, we encourage you to contact your account manager for additional details and pricing.

Activity Feeds – a major new upgrade, Activity Stream will give all community members, particularly active ones, a compelling new reason to visit the site more often and become more involved with their peers. Checking updates in the stream will help users more actively explore their fellow members’ profiles and actions. The result? Members are more likely to discover events, causes and discussions  they may not have found on their own.

Document Sharing – new Document Share will give our clients the ability to motivate their users and groups to upload and share documents. This release includes the capabilities of uploading, viewing and commenting on documents in the community. The same administrative controls currently used in the community will apply and virus-checking will be included.

Forums at the Group Level – This new feature will allow groups to create their own Forums and thereby inspire members to engage in discussions with others sharing similar interests. Group Forums will also be accessible within the Community Forums but will only be visible to members of the specific Group and Forum Administrators. Each Group will have the option to decide whether or not it wants to allow Forums.

“AddThis” Functionality – AddThis facilitates social sharing and bookmarking of community pages and content modules to other popular social sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. This new community feature will allow you and your members to share community content (including User Profiles, User Blogs / User Blog Entries, User Photos Albums / User Photos, User Video Albums / User Videos, as well as Group-linked Profiles, Blogs, Photos Albums, Photos, Video Albums, Videos, plus Event Profiles and Feed Roll Articles) with other social sites your organization utilizes. Another important asset of AddThis is that it creates the opportunity for you to market your private label community to your constituents’ existing networks.

Twitter News Feed – This new feature will allow registered Twitter members with a valid Twitter user name to display Twitter feeds on individual user or group profiles.