LEVERAGE SOFTWARE EXPANDS ITS SOCIAL NETWORKING AND COMMUNITY FUNCTIONALITY WITH NEW RELEASE
New Features Enhance Discussion Functionality, Encourage Community Participation, and Improve Platform Extensibility
San Francisco– July 13, 2006 – Today Leverage Software, a leading provider of online social-networking and community solutions, released a new set of enhancements to its CustomerConnect and EventConnect products. The latest release adds significant enhancements for end-users and includes group and forum discussion improvements, integrated scheduling and calendaring functionality enhancements, and the ability to see others who are ‘online now’. Leverage Software’s Release 5.2 includes:
Enhanced Groups and Forum Discussion Functionality
Groups have been extended to encourage participation and user adoption by making groups more discoverable both inside and outside of the system. In addition, forum discussions may now be subscribed to through both email and RSS.
Features to Encourage Participation and User Adoption
New features have been added to make a community more open, visible, and viral, including showing an ‘Online Now’ indicator when community members are logged in at the same time. More prominent ‘photo upload’ placement also encourages the uploading of pictures during the profile set up process, enhancing the user experience. Finally, the new QuickConnect card empowers individuals to place a dynamic card on their blogs, in signature files, or any external location providing community members with the ability to become community recruiters.
Improved Scheduling and Calendar Functionality
Based upon direct customer feedback, a number of calendar features have been added to make it easier to manage a large number of onsite meetings, to improve overall reporting, to manage meeting rooms or other physical locations, and to make it easier for end users to set up peer-to-peer meetings.
Administration Features
Features have been added to make it easier for community administrators to report upon and export their data, as well as provide the ability for administrators to grant rights to other administrators.
“We are continuously seeking ways to make our communities even more vibrant, to create a sense of urgency, and to encourage participation,” said Mike Walsh, CEO and founder of Leverage Software. “In response to the feedback that we receive from our customer base and users within Leverage Software communities, we are very excited about the enhancements to discussions and groups, the addition of presence, and the addition of the viral QuickConnect cards. Our customers who host these communities are very excited about the new administrative features which gives them even more flexibility, and the enhanced interactive search and profile export capabilities which make it even easier to export data from the system and mine it for insight.”
"With this release,” said Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO and founder, “we are launching another set of functionality to demonstrates our ongoing commitment to to our customers. With our hosted, software-as-a-service model, all these enhancements are immediately available within the hundreds of communities powered by our software.”
These newly released features are additive to Leverage Software’s already robust social-networking and community platform which is powering the communities of over 100 companies across many industries. Features of the core platform include member profile space, online matchmaking and community visualization tools, the ability to request introductions and set up meetings, robust groups functionality and threaded discussions, networking calendar functionality, email and RSS notifications, a collaborative space for media file sharing, a targeted messaging platform and revenue-generating sponsorship engine, and robust customer analytics.
About Leverage Software
Leverage Software is the leader in enterprise-class social networking and community solutions, powering the online communities for over 100 companies in technology, media, consumer products, financial services and pharmaceutical industries including Microsoft, HP, Sun, SAP, Autodesk, Salesforce.com, Charles Schwab, McKesson, VNU, IDG, Dow Jones and The New York Times. With two innovative products—CustomerConnect for ongoing communities of purpose and EventConnect for extending the life of your face to face events—Leverage Software helps companies improve customer loyalty, build stronger brands, drive word-of-mouth marketing, innovate faster and listen to customers like never before. The Leverage Community Platform empowers customers to create online communities where they can meet, build relationships, share ideas, contribute content, and learn from one another, while giving companies a way to drive incremental revenue through incremental sponsorships and targeted cross-sell messaging, increase customer satisfaction and retention, and glean valuable customer insight. Leverage Software is based in San Francisco and on the web at www.leveragesoftware.com
Media Contact:
Jennifer Zeszut
Leverage Software
415.602.7060
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