Fusion Productions - Integrating Meetings, Learning & Technology

Level 1 – Starter Edition

Fusion’s Starter Edition is for those associations who would like to test the waters with communities, providing a low-risk entry point into a platform that can grow with an organization’s needs as they evolve.

The Starter Edition provides a platform for simple online discussions, enabling you to create an unlimited number of communities based — as your needs dictate — upon topics, hot issues, geography, competencies, or any other topicalities that drive your organization’s need to communicate across time and space. Within each community, members can:

• Conduct unlimited discussions
• View profiles of community members
• Keep tabs on community news announcements
• Share files

Context-sensitive help makes ease-of-use a snap.

Additionally, association staff and community facilitators will have a variety of tools to manage these communities.

Level 2 – Standard Edition

The Standard Edition of our software is the most powerful and easy-to-use community building software used by some of the most successful association-run communities today.

When your association’s communities hit a critical mass and members are ready to take advantage of a variety of more advanced collaboration tools, your Starter Edition can be migrated to the Standard Edition without losing content or the user’s look and feel. You pay only the difference in price between the Starter and Standard Editions.

The Standard Edition is also a good entry point for associations who already employ a discussion board product that they are outgrowing.

In addition to the features included in the Starter Edition, the Standard Edition offers a greater variety of sophisticated collaborative tools without sacrificing ease-of-use, such as:

• Member authentication based upon records in your membership database/association management system (AMS);
• Separate ability to create communities for members and non-members;
• Customizable, dynamic personal home pages for all community members;
• A “Join/Visit Communities” feature that lets visitors search through a large number communities to find ones that might be of interest to join, and a “Find Related Communities” feature that can recommend communities that may be of interest based upon a user’s profile;
• An “Advanced Search” that allows members to specify modules and specific communities to provide more granular control over search results;
• Simple polling;
• Community update notifications;
• A variety of calendaring functions, including a “Community Events Calendar” to track community-wide events and a “My Events Calendar” with the ability to track personal events;
• A dedicated “frequently asked questions” (“FAQ”) area for each community that is simple to maintain;
• A dedicated “news” sharing area that enables community members to post news items that are of potential interest to other members of the community;
• A “link sharing” archive that provides a handy set of shared bookmarks to other websites of interest to community members;
• An internal messaging system that lets community members communicate directly with each other without cluttering up their “real” email boxes;
• A “chat” feature that enables real-time discussions;
• A banner ad module that enables the placement of in-house or third party ads inside any community or all communities. Targeting is based on keyword assignments that match the communities themselves.

In addition, the Standard Edition includes an enhanced set of administrative tools to support this level’s advanced features.

Level 3 - Enterprise Edition

The Enterprise Edition is a customized installation of the Standard Edition that provides tight integration between your communities and your other systems to support knowledge management strategies and other organization-wide data sharing initiatives. The Enterprise Edition is ideal for associations that that wish to exchange data in real-time between their communities and their Association Management System (AMS), Content Management System (CMS) and/or Learning Management System (LMS).

In addition to the powerful features of the Standard Edition, the Enterprise Edition provides the following enhancements:

• “Real-time” authentication (two-way data exchange) between the communities and the client’s Association Management System (AMS). This guarantees that only the most recent records are used for granting access, and provides a conduit for community activity to play a role in a member’s AMS record;
• Support for third party newsfeeds provides the ability for CoP to receive and display external news news (such feeds from Moreover.com) that relates to community interests;
• A document collaboration system enables users to work on documents across space and time, featuring “check in/check out” functionality and version control;
• WebEx integration enables links to a WebEx conferencing/collaboration system;
• Taxonomy support enables information in software modules to be tagged with metadata that can be used with an existing taxonomy infrastructure;
• A “member search” that makes it easy to find other community members with similar interests, environments or in similar geographic locations as you, people who can assist you, and who you can assist in turn;
• Send community messages directly from your member search results, so that you can invite other members to join a new community or ask whether they would like to start a new community with you;
• Group Assignments from AMS - Capability to have different features and/or communities available to different groups.

The Enterprise Edition can be customized to your heart’s desire, with custom modules, special behaviors, and additional integration considerations over and above those described above. Talk to your Fusion Productions CoP representative about the possibilities and to receive an estimate based upon your organization’s unique needs.