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Newsletter December 2008

Date: 12/2008

Happy Holidays

Tis the season. And as we wrap up 2008, a crazy year for sure, and look forward to 2009, we welcome you to Pringo's first monthly newsletter. We plan to inform, interest, and hopefully entertain you each month with Pringo news, tips, updates and more!

But we also want to hear from you. Each month we want to spotlight a Pringo client and share your experiences with others. Tell us your success stories and we will feature you in a future newsletter. Send an email to news@pringo.com.

So as we travel the road to a new year together, all of us here at Pringo wish all of you the best of the holiday season and a prosperous new year!

Predictions for 2009

The use of social-networking platforms in 2009 will continue to increase, and their growth will flourish in specific niches, including events, training, market research and business communications, according to Pringo, a leader in empowering online communities.

Pringo CEO Majid Abai offers the following forecast for how social networking will shape up in 2009:

1. The 'new' workforce: As Millennials continue to replace baby boomers, the way employees operate and collaborate is going to change. They will move further away from the use of email as the primary form of communication and move towards instant, quick forms of correspondence, including IM, online chat, text, micro-blogging and other 'real-time' tools. Immediate communication is valuable to the new workforce as they have grown up and are more comfortable with Internet-based interaction.
2. Conferences: While face-to-face, in-person events do and will continue to have value, they also have limitations. Pringo anticipates that show organizers will more widely adopt and implement social-networking platforms to enable attendees to meet and interact virtually, extending the life of a conference by facilitating online conversations between attendees and presenters. Additionally, as companies tighten spending in an increasingly challenging economic environment, many will resort to holding entire conferences online to help companies eliminate the overhead costs of travel, lodging and loss of productivity due to time out of the office. Through online conferencing platforms that include social networking components, participants can meet and interact, plan and coordinate meetings, hold presentations and follow up with each other after the event is over.
3. Market research: As budgets continue to tighten, market research firms will be limited to the amount of on-site analysis they can conduct, but will still need to cover a broad geographic scope to ensure their data is statistically valid. They will likely turn to social-networking platforms to organize and conduct their studies. By identifying and interacting with various customer segments, organizations can design products for those segments that are based on direct feedback received through online communities. Active participants of such communities will then be 'beta' users of the new product and its biggest advocates on other social networks.
4. Training: Corporate HR departments, as well as other education and training organizations, will find value in using social-networking platforms to hold training sessions and interact with their constituents. They allow short information sessions to be held online that could combine collaboration, interactive sessions, and even games to deliver the message to participants.
5. Intranets: Organizations will incorporate social-networking capabilities into their intranets to enhance internal communication between employees as well as external communication with partners. This will allow colleagues who share common geographic, demographic, or functional boundaries to communicate easily within groups and share knowledge, experiences, and best practices.
6. Enterprise software: Pringo envisions social-networking functions built into various business software, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications, enabling colleagues to collaborate more easily and share knowledge on certain topics or customers.

"The business world is becoming increasingly accustomed to communicating quickly and efficiently over the Internet," said Majid Abai, CEO of Pringo. "Social-networking solutions enable fast and effective correspondence between groups of people, whether employee-to-employee, organization-to-customer or business-to-business. In 2009, we will see social media continue to migrate from a leisure activity to a productive business tool."

Harv's Blog:

Each month Harvard Young, Pringo's Co-Founder/CTO will muse about Pringo happenings, including highlighting cool new features and exciting partnerships. This month, Harv highlights our Docstoc partnership.

With the launch of the new extensions architecture and version 3.0 of our platform, the possibilities of what can be built on the Pringo engine are endless. It is great to see so many people using our platform, but quite frankly, I get my kicks from seeing all the new features that we have enabled other developers to create.

Much of the new underlying architecture that we have created will streamline and standardize development. Our goals were to basically create foundation classes that allow developers to focus purely on development of functions and classes and not on UI design. Additionally, this provides a consistent user experience and all elements of the page can be styled with CSS. This month, our highlight is on the DocStoc extension, which was built on this new foundation.

Docstoc allows your community users to upload office documents (such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF) and allow other users to view and share, without ever installing or opening up Word or Excel. Think of it as the YouTube for documents. The DocStoc feature allows you to upload, create thumbnails, and create new content objects just like any other content object. For more information on how to build extensions, and to take an in-depth look at the way the DocStoc extension was built, log in to your admin and go to the wiki at wwiki.pringo.com/w/Extensions_Training. And don't worry, the video has been broken down into small clips.

There will always be amazing new technologies that surface every day and 2009 will truly be a great year to see new breeds of enterprise mashup portals powered by the platform.

Tips and Best Practices:

Each month we will highlight a tip or best practice item to help you administer your site most effectively. This month we want to highlight development servers. If you do not have a development server, we strongly suggest adding one. Any changes you make to your site should always be done on a development server, with the exception of content and maintaining your customers. Changes that affect any functionality, once done on your development server, should be fully tested before migrating the changes to your live production site. If you would like more information on a development server, please contact your project manager.

Programming Note

Out with the old. In with the new. As Microsoft readies itself for the release of Internet Explorer 8, support for IE6 will end this month. Therefore, Pringo will no longer support this browser. We recommend your adding this information to your Help/FAQ page with a link for upgrading to IE7, Firefox 3 or Safari 3.

Questions? Comments?

Is there something you'd like to see in a future newsletter? Do you have a question you'd like us to address? Send them in to news@pringo.com.