To keep my knowledge of community platforms sharp and up-to-date, I attend training and users conferences for many of the major community vendors, and this week I attended the 2015 (second annual) Socious users conference.
For those Socious customers who couldn’t make it, or for any organizations considering Socious for their online community platform, here are some of the highlights:
- Socious has recently released their community software on a mobile responsive Bootstrap framework. This is a change that has been years in the making, and brings the Socious design in alignment with users’ changing expectations about a mobile web experience.
- This same design overhaul also beautifies, modernizes, and simplifies the desktop user experience; if you haven’t seen screenshots or a demo from one of their new Bootstrap-enabled sites, have a look.
- The Bootstrap framework update also provides a more extensive theming engine, including color and font pickers that allow novice users to create their own attractive community designs by pointing and clicking — no knowledge of CSS required.
- Social-sign-on is now available for customers who aren’t using a single-sign-on with any other database or website.
- Socious is investing heavily in further developments to its API. One of the more exciting results of this initiative will be the ability to quickly and easily integrate third party applications into your Socious platform in an App Store style interface. I saw a screenshot showing that you’d be able to activate integrations in a single click with the likes of Mailchimp, GoToWebinar and other popular applications.
- Socious now offers online community management services if your organization can’t afford to hire a dedicated community manager.
