A solution for everyone
Our Community Suite is flexible enough to meet the needs of any group wanting to develop and foster their own community. Here, we've provided a few examples of the types of applications that benefit from the power, scalability and user experience that our Community Suite affords.
Customer Support
More and more businesses are realizing the benefits of having an online community as an integral part of their customer support operations. Your total support costs can be reduced by conducting a proportion of your support via your community - customers can search for responses to previous similar issues, thus reducing the burden on your support team. Knowledgeable members of the community can be encouraged to provide peer-to-peer assistance, and this can be rewarded using built-in features. Other support materials, such as software and documentation, can be disseminated easily using standard functions. Your community can become an active, ever-changing knowledgebase with fewer man-hours than a traditional support/knowledgebase solution.
Corporate Intranet
The Community Suite can help you bring efficiency to your internal communication by creating a central location for discussions, files and events, utilizing the portal feature. Using the flexible group features of the Suite, staff can be granted access to discussions based on their real-world role or position. The calendar enables important company dates to be tracked, and again this can be based on group permissions. With the login manager, the Community Suite can integrate with your existing authentication systems (such as LDAP), and can run on a variety of database platforms by way of database drivers. IPS Community Suite can bring your staff together in one virtual meeting-place, while still retaining distinct roles and responsibilities.
Non-profit/Charity Organizations
Charity organizations will find that fostering a community can be highly beneficial to their activities. A forum is the perfect environment to develop support and awareness for a cause, and as members interact and build relationships, the cause can be strengthened. The community calendar is perfect for listing events relevant to the organization, while the photo gallery is great for showing off past events. The Community Suite centralizes communication between the organization and its supporters, creating efficiency and therefore saving time and money - all-important for non-profit entities.
Entertainment
Online communities were born out of groups of people, enthusiastic about a brand, idea or opinion, coming together to discuss their passion with likeminded individuals - so it's no wonder that these entertainment-driven sites are as popular and important as ever. Communities ranging from small fansites to large corporate-backed artist sites can benefit from features offered by the Community Suite. The gallery allows users to share media with other users while the blog system enables them to have their own personal soapbox. The social networking features available are a perfect match for communities such as this, creating relationships between passionate users.
Need a hosted solution?
If you need a community solution, but don't want to have to arrange hosting, databases and configuration, we can help. We have speciality hosting packages designed specifically for community hosting, so that everything runs at best for the task at hand, and we have packages to suit all sizes of community. If you're an enterprise and require additional managed services, feel free to contact us to discuss your needs. We have extensive experience in managing large community installations for enterprise.Community Hosting packages
Enterprise options
