Features & Capabilities Overview

It’s not a question of if your organization will use Social Business Software.  It’s more a question of whether it will be implemented with business objectives in mind, supporting a specific business process, or randomly implemented as standalone technologies, such as wikis, blogs, and forums.

There is a vast difference between social software and social software for business. The first is often a set of independent application features, often open source in nature. The latter is an enterprise grade social platform with the comprehensive set of capabilities to serve the needs of individual initiatives as well as the organization as a whole. This requires an enterprise grade architecture, security, permissioning, workflow, multiple deployment options, and integration with the enterprise ecosystem. If your choice is the latter, Participate, OutStart’s social software for business platform is the better fit.
 
As the name imparts, Participate empowers the backbone of your business, people – your employees, customers, and partners - to get involved and engage with one another by sharing insights, experiences, and know-how. 

Participate offers a new era for collaboration across your organization, enabling conversations, breaking barriers, and capturing a knowledge base of historical ideas, insights, and experiences that can be made available for ongoing use. 

By joining conversations, independent of roles or organizational and geographic barriers, Participate improves the overall effectiveness and efficiency of your extended enterprise. Organizations today are using Participate for a wide range of purposes including:

• Implementing Collaborative Sales Enablement to improve their sales execution and effectiveness
• Leveraging their customers’ expertise to improve support and decrease support costs, using social software as an extension to the CRM system
• Enabling Field Services resources to rapidly solve customer problems
• Radiating insight from customer implementations within Professional Services, while enabling practice directors and experts to collaborate and educate their implementers

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Core Product Capabilities 

Engage with Experts

When you run into a situation where you need help, what do you do? You turn to your colleagues, but do they always have the best insight and experience to help? What if they are unavailable? Isn't it time you leveraged the entire collective talent and intelligence of your organization?
 
With Participate engaging with the right people has never been easier. Participate’s Personal Concierge is your one stop shop for getting others’ ideas and insights to help you effectively solve problems. The power of the Personal Concierge is both the historical conversations captured and made available and the people behind it - the people with the experience, talent and insight you need. 

Participate intelligently identifies these experts using its Expertise Profiling engine. It then sends your query to the best experts and facilitates the exchange of answers through email, all the while capturing the solutions so that other users can benefit from them in the future. Read More

Create and Collaborate

Participate’s Wiki engine provides a collaborative environment where people can add to and extend work done by others; hence, less time is spent re-inventing the wheel and more on moving forward. The collaborative nature results in an acceleration of innovation and development, and information itself is deeper, broader, and more accurate.

Users are not limited to creating content within Participate, nor would people have to change what they are doing to be able to contribute content. With Participate’s out of the box integration for Microsoft applications, users can quickly share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and emails using familiar desktop applications.

Participate’s Media Sharing capabilities provide a creative outlet for users to present, teach, and demonstrate ideas, videos and simulations. Read More

Start & Join Conversations

In any office, some of the best business conversations happen around the water cooler. It's often the place where a discussion is spurred that helps you solve a problem. Through informal interactions, people share experiences, get expert advice, and share their insights. But in today’s distributed and multi-national world, a single organization has many water coolers, all of them trapped by geographic and physical constraints. What if you had a single, universal water cooler where your entire organization could converge, powered by the convenience of modern web technology so it is accessible anytime, anywhere, by anyone?

Participate is the universal watercooler where these conversations flow naturally by leveraging the platform’s Blogging, Discussions, Instant Messaging, Private Messaging and Email capabilities. Read More

Harness the Collective Intelligence

As Participate captures people’s conversations, insights, experiences, and contributions, it becomes the center for the collective intelligence of your organization. To harness this vast wealth of information, Participate provides intuitive technologies so that users can find information they need using natural language sentences or keywords. They can also filter information by the areas they are interested in, or the type of content for which they are looking for.

Users can also stay abreast of new information passively by subscribing to a personalized e-newsletter that provides a synopsis of all new and updated contributions of interest, and/or contribution by individuals you are following.  Read More

Leverage your Network

To keep abreast of everything, organizations frequently have time consuming and costly coordination meetings. Imagine if the number of people in that room or on that call could spend that hour working instead of meeting? Now think about your popular social network sites – in a matter of minutes you can quickly find out what your friends and family from around the world are up to. What if you could be just as efficient in finding out what your colleagues and teams are up to? Who is working on what project? What solutions have they discovered? What was the latest activity which with they were involved? 

Participate allows employees and customers to connect and interact with their network of peers and experts and be informed through quick, micro-notifications of where they are or on what they are working. 
  
The system helps you connect to people regardless of geographic or organizational barriers, helping you discover hidden talent or valuable business information that you didn’t know existed, while learning from others’ insights and experiences. Read More

Go Mobile

Many organizations have a good portion of their workforce in the field where computer access is more challenging. These employees have the greatest need for a platform like Participate. They can get answers, and solve problems by leveraging the information, expertise and resources available inside the organization. 
 
With Participate Mobile, traveling or remote employees and customers can use their mobile devices to take advantage of your extended organization’s collective intelligence. They can access the Expert Directory, connect to a community, or use email to interact with the system to quickly connect with others who have the know-how to help solve problems or answer questions, as well as share their own experiences and expertise. Read More

Work Better Together

Participate Workspaces provides a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual interactions. Participate offers all necessary tools in one place online, enabling you to connect the best minds to work effectively across boundaries: internally and externally with partners, customers and suppliers. It connects them regardless of geographic or time barriers and keeps them abreast of what everyone is working on to ensure the entire team is on the same page. The system captures these insights and ideas so others can benefit and learn from them. 

The Workspaces leverages Participate’s Task Management feature to allow project leaders, managers and even team members to drive the team to project completion.  Read More

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