Now that we have grown accustomed to blogs, wikis, forums and similar type of social applications online it is time to bring those features into our work environment. With the advances in technology and improvements in usability we are not just browsing and reading online, we like to interact, improve, tag or comment on the content we are viewing online.
Unify as a platform is ideal for deploying interactive content applications and our roadmap is very much focused on social web 2.0 features.
We like to split this new phenomena into two main areas; technical and social features.
Social web
With great new technology but more importantly, improved usability, the web is now a social platform. Creating teams and collaborating online is fast becoming the preferred way of streamlining business processes as well as building communities around you brand which at the end of the day support sales and marketing.
Many of our clients are now publishing blogs internally and externally. We have taken the commenting aspect of blogging and used it in different contexts. Giving users the ability to comment on content, products, projects and digital assets has helped our clients with facilitating communications online and improve content quality.
Unify is very modular and to us it does not really matter who is creating content, you can define access privileges and configure any type of content using out of the box functionality. This has meant the some of our clients have now opened up their sites for user generated content which is a great way for building communities online.
Technology
Open standards and open source applications are evolving at an amazing pace and we do spend a lot of time researching technology trends and integrating as new features in Unify.
AJAX enables us to create a rich interface online similar to desktop applications. Unify provides AJAX content gateways for viewing and searching through large volumes of content.
RSS feeds and simple syndication is becoming more popular for users to monitor content updates and also for embedding external content on your websites and intranets. Unify provides a very flexible feed module for listing out content as well as for syndicating content on the pages you build.
Our modular approach to web applications has enabled our clients to build Web 2.0 functionality without having to do any Java coding. You can build blogs, comment on any content entry or asset and open up forms for user generated content.