Every couple years our family ventures back to my wife Sony's native country of Brazil. When we do this it always offers an outside looking in perspective on what we are doing at CNP and gives me a chance to reflect on the things we should be focusing on to ad value to our customers. I am often making comparisons between the many cultural differences and observations about the many similarities . My analogy is that it is the same ice cream with slightly different flavors. Our second home in Navegantes SC is a community exploding with tourism and the people come from all parts of Brazil to vacation there. In some ways it is a step back in time since there are a lot of local folks that have not caught up with use new technologies since this grew out of a fishing village. Many of the visitors are well in pace with the trends of globalization so this makes for an interesting perspective on how technology is getting integrated in to the commerce and culture here. It makes me remember the importance of human relationships and something we should never lose in our engagements with customers or friends and family.

One interesting example of this community is when I wanted to purchase a used bicycle and was asking a group of older local gentlemen for directions to a place that would sell me a good used bike, since a gringo on a new bike stands out and I just want to blend in and relax a bit when I am here.

The response was... "go up the road to Edwardo's place and ask anybody" since everybody knew the guy that sold used bikes. Well I think you can get the idea here that these directions implied first the value of reputation since Edwardo's place was just an ordinary house of someone respected in the community. It emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust and awareness of real people in your community since it is often how others will navigate to your business. In a virtual web world this is kind of like saying "go to Google and type in "XYZ" then read the comments of others for direction".

I will be the first to admit that I am a bit of a geek and I like my techno toys/software and all of the magic they can do but one of the lessons I take from this is how important it is to not get distracted by all of the "cool" technologies we have and lose sight of developing real relationships in the right circle and community of your piers.

The priority should always be the relationship and the technology should never get in the way or distract from nurturing quality relationships.

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Comunity Building with Joomla CMS

Since the boom with Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace , Twitter and a host of others portals it has been a natural trend for organizations to want harness the fact that users are gaining both comfort and skills with social networking tools.  This has opened the door for what some are calling "niche social networks". For example; organizations like Chambers of Commerce or Associations and organizations that have traditional social networks can find opportunity leveraging online communities.

When Joomla launched 5 years ago the early contender for delivering social communities was the Community Builder Components developed by the folks a http://www.joomopolis.com. While they still are among the top 2 and offer a fantastic solution for "Community Building" with a Joomla CMS platform, the JomSocial extensions by http://www.azrul.com has filled in a few gaps that the user public has been screaming for.

Quick Comparison

When you compare face to face these two component suites for Joomla CMS you will find they have many of the same basic features for extending the user profiles. Note: This is capability is also useful for many non community sites that want to build additional fields and data around a users profile. They each have abilities for connecting "friends" relationships and many other common features. However, what I have found particularly useful is the fact that JomSocial has opened up their code in a more useful way by offering an API. What this has done is inspire momentum with the global development community to build on the framework and add several useful features and capabilities that are just not possible with any of the other Community Building extensions for Joomla.

The latest release if 1.8.x features enhanced video sharing, event registration management features and much more. You can visit their web site for more info at http://www.jomsocial.com. Combined with the new add-ons available http://jomsocial.com/download/addons.html there are very few limitations with this environment for building custom communities in just about any industry or niche market.

A couple key new add-ons I like are:

Multiple profiles: This is ideal for educational communities where they need to segment profiles by teacher, student, instructor and Administrator. There are plenty of other practical uses

Group File Sharing: While there are many ways to share files and documents in Joomla there are now add-ons for file sharing and emailing for public and private groups. This offers more opportunities and tools available for group collaboration

Here are some links to 3^rd party vendors that offer add-ons for JomSocial :

o   http://www.videowhisper.com/?p=Video+Conference

o   http://www.joomplace.com/e-learning/surveyforce-deluxe.html

o   http://spacerobotfive.com/

o   http://www.corejoomla.com/products/leader-board.html

o   http://www.joomlaced.com/jomsocial-applications/flickr-gallery-for-jomsocial

o   http://www.socialcode.co.uk/products/products.html

o   http://www.joomlamafia.com/downloads/components/folder/16-targeted-mailer.html

All-in-all JomSocial with it's new thrust in the development community to build add-on's makes it our preferred choice for developing social communities.

CNP Integrations has chosen to become an official JomSocial Developer. This allows us to have VIP technical support and access to JomSocial core developers through development life cycles on any project.  Our expertise in developing JomSocial Communities sets and integrating other business systems sets us apart from other development companies and it allows us to deliver better value for our customer's technology investments.

More information can be found at http://www.joomladesignservices.com

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Ok I know it has been a while but my standard excuse is that I have been busy working... well is this not always the case? :-) Well things should be better now that we are on a roll with our new project management team and the fact we have resolved a few internal projects that are going to free up my time to get in here more often...

Our new SEO guru Freedom Flynn sent me this articleand I found it to be very interesting and worth you all taking a look: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4416/Inbound-Marketing-the-Next-Phase-of-Marketing-on-the-Web/?source=email_PM1208

We are heading into a bit of a crazy time where folks are going to need to do more with less and be very wise with how they spend there money. Hopefully we can make the case and prove that we can be a good resource for you to work through this process as far as you web tools and portal development needs.

This month we are releasing some great new training for info@hand. We believe it is the first of its kind. We have built the first four courses with a nice interactive interface and around 80 modules of topic related content. These are accompanied by training guides and skill retention quizzes. Users can even take tests online and print out certificates. We also have put up a collection of excellent tutorials for components and modules for the new Joomla 1.5 framework.  You can check all of this out at http://www.infoathand.us/ or cut to the chase with our training landing page at http://training.infoathand.us/

We are finalizing the details for a series of webinars that we hope to begin in January and this will compliment our overall training program. You can sign up for our webinar newsletter and start to get the inside scoop at http://webinars.infoathand.us/ 

So there are a lot of things going on here... such as a couple new product launches in  the works, a great new hosting infrastructure... we have our own "Cloud' whoa... what a buzz word! And oh here comes another one... a virtual office is a "Green" office... kind of what we deliver in the way of web solutions for running your business. So stay tuned knowing we are here to help bring you fast innovations and a great team of professionals to support your projects and training requirements.

More to come...

CN

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