We are happy to announce that we are releasing a new version of Clearvale on Friday, April 27, starting at 5:00 PM, PDT (12:00 Midnight UTC). Here is a summary of the features planned for this release:

SharePoint Integration.  Customers with Microsoft SharePoint systems can now access SharePoint documents within their Clearvale network. Once configured, they can share files to Clearvale from within SharePoint by using the Clearvale It command.

Alternatively, when adding files in Clearvale, they can access their SharePoint system and select the file to add. 

Note that SharePoint files are not actually uploaded to Clearvale. Instead, Clearvale maintains a link to the file in the SharePoint system.  SharePoint files are marked as follows in Clearvale:

This integration is limited to SharePoint 2010 at this time.

Control audio/video file downloads.  Currently, you cannot prevent someone from downloading audio or video files that are uploaded to your network. A new network setting allows network administrators to enable file owners to control whether their audio and video files are downloadable. When set, the file owner can choose, on a case-by-case basis, whether their audio or video files are downloadable.

Checking the View Only checkbox prevents people from downloading the file. The Download link that usually appears next to these files is hidden from other users. Also, for embedded files, the embed code is also hidden. This feature is turned off by default. The network administrator can enable it by going to Admin>Network Administration.

Easier to maintain your profile. When you click Edit Settings, the new Edit Profile page appears. It looks as follows:

You now manage your profile picture from this page.  Also, you manage your name that appears within the network on this page, as opposed to using the Account Settings sub-tab.

Login field renamed. The Login field that you see when logging into Clearvale is being renamed as the Email field. This new label should enable new users to get started using Clearvale faster by helping them remember that their email address is their Clearvale login.

Activity point update. You no longer earn an activity point for rating a forum topic comment.  You can still rate the comments by indicating if they were helpful or not, but you do not earn an activity point for doing so. For details on earning activity points, see this section of online help.

The March 9th release includes several enhancements that we are excited to share with you:

• Filter your Activity stream. The current behavior is to show all activities for followed members, spaces, and content as well as your activities in your Activity stream. In the March release, this is still the default behavior; however, you can choose to limit the Activity stream to specific types of updates, such as just status updates or just activities pertaining to your content. Select a filter option from the Streams drop-down list, and the Activity stream is refreshed with the type of activities you selected.

• Create tasks. You can now create tasks and assign them to network members. For each task, you can set a due date and attach documents. Any tasks assigned to you appear in the Action Items tab of your Activity stream. Creating tasks is specific to Clearvale Enterprise.

• Sort videos by popularity. You will be able to sort the display of videos in a widget by the highest rated video or by the most viewed video.
• Conduct more specific searches. When conducting a search, will be able to choose an Advanced Search link where you can specify more details about your search—what type of content to include or exclude, when the content was published, and so on.

• Share polls and forums topics. Share forum topics across forums, spaces, and networks in your ecosystem. Share polls across spaces and networks in your ecosystem. This feature is available on a trial basis for select customers who have purchased the right to use the Ecosystem premium service. The feature will be available in a future release for all Clearvale Enterprise customers.
• Prevent data loss when clicking away. In rich-text fields, Clearvale will prompt you before letting you click away from a window in which you have typed some text.
• Support more smart phones. We are providing support for mobile viewing on more smart phones. Simply point your mobile browser to your network URL and see a streamlined interface to your network. This is currently optimized for Windows Mobile 6.5. Will be optimizing for other platforms in the future. Note that this is in addition to the Clearvale iPhone app that we introduced last year.
• Performance and security improvements and several bug fixes.

BroadVision announced a new version of Clearvale last week. The new version, called Clearvale Express, is a scaled down version of Clearvale that folks can use when they don’t need all the bells and whistles provided with Clearvale. Clearvale Express is free to use with some limitations (maximum of 20 communities and 1 Gigabyte of space). It provides enough to give you a taste of using Clearvale. If you run out of space, you can purchase additional space, or consider upgrading to the full version of Clearvale.

Clearvale Express looks like Clearvale, but there are some limitations. The following table identifies what you will/won’t find in Clearvale Express.

To try Clearvale Express, go to www.clearvale.com and follow the instructions for setting up a Clearvale Express network.

Are you finding  that the Clearvale menu tabs are hard to read as a result of the November Clearvale release? If so, try updating the colors associated with tab names. To change the color of the tab names, do the following:

1. Select Admin>Appearance.
2. Click the Basic tab in the Appearance editor.
3. In the Tab area, remove the color associated with Font and the Mouse-over font.
4. Click Save.
5. Check the color of the tab names.

If you are happy with the look of the tab names, you are done. If you want to make some adjustments, go back to the Appearance editor and change the Font and  Mouse-over font color to a specific color that you like. You need to pick a color that looks good with both the background used for the currently selected tab as well as the non-selected tabs.

Another Clearvale release is in the works. The November 15th release includes several new features to make Clearvale easier than ever to use. Read on for a preview of the release.

Better Notifications and More Control of Them

The My Streams widget, which lets you see what activities your co-workers are up to on the network, now provides buttons for managing the activity stream.

In particular:

• Use the Refresh button  to refresh the content in the My Streams widget.
• Use the Connections button  to manage your follow connections, including people, communities, and content that you are following.
• Use the Settings button  to manage your stream settings and email notification preferences.

These same buttons appear in your activity stream on your profile page.

Easier Management of Forums and Communities

A refreshed user interface makes it easier for you to manage forums. As an administrator, you can change the order in which forums appear.

The default image for forums was updated as well as shown in the above image.

For communities, you can see who you invited to the community and whether or not they joined. For those whom you invited but they did not join, you can resend the invitation.

Communities also include a privacy indicator that indicates who can see the community and whether an invitation is required.

More Choices with Cloning

Previously when cloning a network, you had just one option—whether or not to include the network members and content. You now have an additional option when cloning a network—whether or not to include all of the network communities. If you include the network communities, the following is included for each community: community settings, community page layouts, and community folder structures. Folder structures are included for files, wikis, blogs, and forums.

New  iPhone App

Keep up with your Clearvale networks on your iPhone, iPad, or iTouch by by downloading the Clearvale app from the Apple App Store—it is free! The app will be available from the App Store in December. Use the app to keep up on the latest activity on your network and within your communities.

Trial Networks

Clearvale now lets you create a new network with a 45-day free trial period. A free-trial message appears on all networks that are considered trial networks until you purchase Clearvale. If at the end of 45-days you do not purchase Clearvale, your network is disabled. Advertisements no longer appear across the top of the page in any Clearvale networks.

We are pushing out a Clearvale refresh today. In addition to fixing several bugs, we made some user interface improvements we hope that you like. In a nutshell, here are the user interface improvements:

Uploading files is simplified. Previously uploading files required you to step through two pages to upload one or more files. We simplified this so that it is now a one-step process.

Community management is improved. When creating a community, you can choose to invite members while creating the community. Previously you had to finish creating the community, and then invite members. Additionally, when listing community members, the list is more concise so that more members appear at one time. You can easily see and change the community roles assigned to community members.

If you are using LDAP, we provide failover support. You can now list multiple LDAP servers that you want Clearvale to access. Only mirrored clusters are supported. Data from all servers must be in sync. Clearvale LDAP support is a Premium Service.

Check out the online help for details on using these new features.

Release Notes for the September 29, 2010 release are available here.

We are super excited to announce a new release of Clearvale planned for September 29th, 7:00 PDT. Read on for details about the new features.

Improved activity updates. Networks and communities now provide a “wall” area where you can see the latest activity in the network or community.  Use the Network Activities widget to keep a pulse on the network, comment on other member’s activities, share what you are working on, and so on.

A similar widget called Communities Activities is provided for keeping track of activities in a community.

Your profile page also includes a “wall” area where you can see your activity as well as the activity of the people that you work closely with.

Support for different page layouts. Clearvale includes two network themes:

• The Contemporary theme looks as follows and is used for all new networks as well as any existing networks for which BroadVision applied an early version of this theme:

• The Classic theme, used for all other networks, looks as follows:

You can switch themes at any time. In addition to network themes, you can control the page layout used for each page. The page layout controls how wide the columns are. For each page in your network, you can use the three even columns, or three columns with a wide middle column.

Additionally, you can work with BroadVision and create your own themes.

Follow relationships instead of contacts. Any contact relationships you currently have are migrated to the follow relationship. By following people, communities, or content, Clearvale displays updates regarding these people and this content in your Activities block, available on your My Profile page. (If you are using the three even column layout on your profile page, you will need to click the My Streams link to see the Activity block.) A key difference between contacts and followers is that when you make someone a contact, you became their contact as well. With followers, you can choose to follow someone, but that person isn't required to follow you.

If you use the Contacts or Contacts' Activities widgets, they will no longer appear in your network.

More roles. Clearvale currently provides three roles for network members: Admin, Member, and Disabled. In the new release, the complete set of roles will be:

• Owner (of network)
• Administrator
• Moderator
• Writer
• Reader
• Disabled

You can set the default role for all new network members to be either Reader or Writer. You can change the roles assigned to a member at any time.

When your site is upgraded to this release, the member who created the network becomes an Owner instead of an Admin. Anyone else with the Admin role remains an administrator. For all other members, they are assigned the Writer role. You can change these roles as needed.

Add Link on Widgets. Many widgets now provide an Add link, allowing you to quickly add content to a widget.

Support for OpenID. As the network administrator, you can configure your network to support OpenID for logging into Clearvale.

Streamlined User Interface. Several improvements were made to the pages that list files, communities, and members in Clearvale. Content is displayed more efficiently, giving you a broader view of your information at one time.

The Files page looks similar to this:

Here is the Communities page:

And here is the Members page:

The page for a particular community now looks as follows:

The My Profile page looks as follows:

Bits and Pieces. We have a few odds and ends that I thought you might like to know about as well:

• We added a My Communities link added at the top of the page. Like the My Networks link, this link allows you to quickly access the most recently visited communities of which you are a member. If you don’t see the community that you are looking for, click View All… link to display all of the communities of which you are a member.
• In the past, the date of the last change was reflected in the number of hours or days that have passed since the change was made. In the upcoming release, the hours or days that have passed are used for up to 4 days. After that point, the specific date the change was made is listed.
• You can now assign a forum topic to a different forum.Occasionally network members might post a forum topic in the wrong forum. Network administrators will be able to move forum topics to the appropriate forum.The one limitation is that the forums must both be in the same content space. That is, you cannot move a forum topic from a forum available on the home page to a forum in a community, and vice versa.
• You should notice improved response time on your network.

We pushed out a small patch today that let's network members be "anonymous" on the network. For network members who are uncomfortable with other members knowing their real name, they can join the network and then select Profile>Edit Profile>Account Settings. Check the box under Account Name Settings titled Make me anonymous on this network. The user is then referred to throughout the network with an anonymous name. The anonymous name is "Member random-number," such as Member 55. Network members cannot see any profile information about this anonymous member, such as their real name, their profile photo, and so on. The network administrators, however, can see the member's real name.

Network administrators can also configure their network so that when people join, they are immediately given the option of being identified by an anonymous name. To set this preference, as the admin select Admin>Network Administration and then check the text box labeled Include Anonymous Member Option when joining.

We also fixed some bugs.

Let us know what you think!

We rolled out a small release over the weekend. Some of the new features that you might notice:

• Easier to share a file or blog post with the current network. Just check the Share with current network checkbox.
• Easier to navigate through a series of blog posts or files by using Next and Previous buttons.You need to navigate to a particular blog post or file, and then you can click Next and Previous as desired.
  
• More control of the header images in your network. You can now optionally include an image where the network name and description appear. Click Admin>Appearance to try this new setting.
  

We have some improvements to the sharing interface that I would like to share with you.  Following our patch last week, you may have noticed that the sharing screen for blogs and files has been simplified, such that all access and sharing is controlled from the sharing panel.  As a result of this, we were able to remove the Privacy dropdown and to simplify the process for sharing documents.

In addition, following the next upgrade (scheduled for early next week) you will have a much easier time sharing to your current network.  A checkbox will be used to share to your current network, negating the need for you to type the name of your network.

Below is a screenshot of what the interface will look like following the next upgrade.

We rolled out a mini patch last night to address issues pertaining to HTTPs access, search, and access to files with privacy of general public. We also fixed a couple broken links.

The May release is here, and boy are we thrilled to finally be able to share it with you! We hope you are as excited about this release as we are!

Clearvale is for Business. Clearvale’s cutting edge technology allows you to run your business better by providing tools to let you easily manage multiple enterprise social networks. By using an ecosystem, your network members share their profile and documents as needed across all networks in your ecosystem. Ecosystems make it easy to handle the shared information seamlessly. Ecosystems are a Premium Service. Contact BroadVision about setting up your own ecosystem.

Clearvale is a Place. When you visit Clearvale, you visit your information place. Information within Clearvale is easier than ever to find and manage because it is organized into distinct spaces:

• Network space. Use this space for content that you want to share with network members.
• Community spaces. Use these spaces for content that you want to share with groups of community members.
• Member Profile space. Use this space for your personal content. Use your profile page to share your personal information with network members.

Content spaces help you manage and share not only your files but your blogs as well.

Clearvale is for Content Sharing. Clearvale offers powerful file sharing abilities. When you upload a file, you can quickly determine who is able to read or edit the file by how you share it. You can share a file with the network space, a specific community, or to select network members. You control whether the file is shared for reading only, or for editing too. Once you share a file, the file looks as if it resides in the space with which you shared it.

Clearvale is for Integration. Through powerful APIs that we provide, you can integrate Clearvale or specific aspects of Clearvale into your own system. For example, you can integrate a series of forum widgets into your application. The APIs are based on the REST architecture, a standard in web services.

Clearvale is for Collaboration. Collaborate even more in this release by using multiple forums in your network or community spaces. For example, you can add a forum for product questions and another as a suggestion box. Get your network members collaborating and improve your business. Microblogs also encourage collaboration among network contacts, making it easy to keep up with what others in the network are working on.

Check out the online help and Clearvale Connect for more details on using all of the features included in this release.

Greetings!

As you may already know from reading previous blog posts, Clearvale has been under renovation! With the changes, you will notice some differences in how items display in your networks after the migration. While all of your content will be retained, some items in widgets and so on may not display as you expect. You can easily update your settings, though. Please refer to this document for additional information.

This blog post will discuss the impact to your image and video widgets, as well as your photo albums and video galleries resulting from the upcoming May release of Clearvale.

Image and Video Widgets: The May release for Clearvale will provide more control over the images and videos that display in your network pages.  Image and video widgets with the (show individual images) or (show individual videos) option selected will only display photos and videos that have been shared to the network space.  As a result, image and video widgets on the network homepage with the (show individual…) option selected will be blank, as there will be no photos or videos shared to the network immediately following the upgrade.  You may correct this by utilizing the sharing function to share images and videos with the network space.  Once you have completed this step, your widgets should function as normal.

Photo Albums and Video Galleries: Previously, you were allowed to pull other members’ photos into your own albums.  Similarly, you were allowed to pull other members’ videos into your own albums.  However, with the May release you will only be able to add other members’ items to your folders if those items have been shared to you.

During the upgrade process we will identify files belonging to other members and remove those files from your folders.  Once the upgrade is completed, members can begin sharing content with each other.  Shared content from other users can then be categorized within your personal folders.

One result of this is that some of your folders may contain fewer items following the May release.  Another is that Image and Video widgets that were pointing to a specific album or gallery may show fewer items following the May release.  This results from the fact that items belonging to other members will have been removed from personal folders.

Note that your content will not be lost during the migration; instead, the improved privacy and sharing controls may result in some content becoming unavailable to you until the owner shares it. Feel free to post any questions you have to forums or comment on this blog.

In May you will see many changes and improvements to Clearvale. One of the more exciting features BroadVision is introducing is the Ecosystem. What is an “ecosystem,” though, and how can it benefit you? I’ll explain in the next paragraphs.

An ecosystem is a collection of affiliated Clearvale networks that has its own administrative console for managing the networks within it. When you purchase this premium service, you obtain access to your console, from which you then create the networks in your ecosystem. For example, your ecosystem might have the following types of networks: an intranet site for your employees, an extranet site to which you invite customers, and an extranet site for sales to use with potential customers. You can add additional networks at any time, and by using the administrative console, you can assign new ecosystem admins, add members to your networks, and perform other administrative tasks. Finally, blog posts and files can be shared across different networks within an ecosystem.

How Does an Ecosystem Benefit Me, Though?

More than merely a linked affiliation between networks, an ecosystem gives organizations the ability to share information easily between networks within the ecosystem: A member profile can be propagated among all the networks in the ecosystem, without the need for the member to recreate it. Administrators can also easily add a person—a new employee, for example—to numerous networks at the same time. Additionally, members can share files with different networks within the ecosystem. If you like, you can even clone an entire ecosystem. Ecosystems are available with custom URLs if you so desire.

One of the many changes you will notice in the May release of Clearvale is that Forums are more robust. In the new release, network administrators can create as many different forums as they like. Within each forum, network members can add and then respond to forum topics. In the current release, you can have one forum per space (network level or community level).

In the May release, you will be able to have multiple forums at each level. For example, on your home page, you might have three forums:

• Home Buyer Forum
• Home Seller Forum
• Renter Forum

You can configure a widget for each of these forums, and then show the topics specific to each forums in a different widget. Or, you can use one Forum widget, and list all the forums in the widget.

Members click on a forum, and then drill down to the forum and its topics. For example, the New Home Buyer Forum might have topics as follows:

Click on the forum topic link to see the topic and reply.

When your network is upgraded to the May release, your current forum topics are moved into a forum called "General Topics." The Forums widget is defined to show the contents of the the "General Topics" forum. You can leave this widget as-is, and continue using a single forum. Or, you can reconfigure your network to use multiple forums.

Good news for Clearvale users! In the upcoming release, you will be able to share files with specific people, communities, and even entire networks. What does this mean for you? You will have an even better user experience and more granular control over your files, as explained in this post.

What Happens with Files Now?

With DocuVault, you can currently share files by assigning access rights to people in your community or network; you can also assign different access rights to individuals by using Access Overrides. You can’t, however, specify access to multiple areas. For example, if you upload a document to your community, a person outside of it does not have access to it unless you grant an override to that person. If you want to grant overrides to several people, you can; however, with large groups, this can take time. Sharing a file with multiple communities or networks is not possible.

What’s Going to Happen?

In the upcoming release, you can share files with combinations of individual people, communities, and networks. You can also share files with multiple people, communities, and networks. When you share a file, you can designate different levels of access, too:

-Owner access indicates that a person has the exact access to the file as the file creator.
-View access indicates that a person, network, or community has view access only; no changes to the file can be made.
-Edit access indicates that a person, network, or community can make changes to the file.

The people with whom you share a file will see it appear in their respective file interfaces. The updated file interface displays files that you create as well as those shared with you. For example, the below screenshot displays the files created by Gina Smith. If she clicks on Shared with Me, she will see files that she did not create but that people have shared with her (either because they chose to share the file with her individually or because she belongs to a network or community with which the file is shared). She will be able to perform actions on the files shared with her based on the share access granted by the file owner.

With this level of flexibility, you will find that Clearvale makes creating, updating, and sharing important information very easy. You can distribute information and make changes to files without the need for multiple copies; you can also save time by eliminating the confusion that multiple file copies can create. Finally, because the upcoming release includes even finer sharing granularity, you can feel assured that everyone who needs access to an important file has it and that the access level is individualized based on need.

Other Benefits of the Change

With the upcoming changes, you can share files even if you do not have DocuVault. DocuVault versioning and file history options will remain available when you purchase the DocuVault feature. However, if you do not have DocuVault, you can still share files as described above.

Get ready! A new release of Clearvale is planned for mid May. Read on for a preview of the new features.

Forums: Currently, you are limited to one forum on the home page and one forum in each community. In the May release, you can create multiple forums for your network or community. Within each forum, you or members can add multiple forum topics. Network or community members can comment on the forum topics.

Content Unification: In an effort to make it easier to manage your content, we plan to combine files, images, videos, and DocuVault files into a single Files interface. The new Files interface will have a similar look and feel to the existing DocuVault screens. A Files interface will exist for each network, community, and person.

Content Sharing: We are enhancing the sharing capabilities such that members can share files to multiple individuals, communities, and even other networks within an ecosystem. (Ecosystems are described below).  This should make it easier for members to work together on shared documents, and therefore encourage collaboration across your organizations. Additionally, you can share blogs with networks and communities.

Multi-file Upload: When uploading files, you can select multiple files to upload. You are no longer limited to uploading a single file at a time. This includes documents, images, and native videos.

Ecosystems: An Ecosystem is a group of networks that enables cross-network profiles, content sharing, notification, and so forth. Each Ecosystem will have a consolidated management console. This is a Premium Service, included in the Enterprise Services package.

RESTful APIs: We are implementing a set of APIs based on the REST architecture, a standard in web services. The access to Clearvale APIs will allow customers to integrate Clearvale or specific aspects of Clearvale, such as a Forum widget, with their own systems.

LDAP Support: We are providing support for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).  This is a Premium Service.

Widget Changes: Several changes are planned for the widgets:

• On the home page, you can now choose to show or hide the Quick Stats widget. Additionally, you can add a Network Directory widget, which is similar to the Community Directory widget, and provides quick links to network pages.

• On community pages, you can now use the Blogs widget.

• On your profile page, you can place the Profile Directory widget, which provides quick links to your profile widgets.

• On all pages, you can configure the Files widget to show just files in a particular folder. The Videos widget supports both embedded videos (Youtube, etc.) and, new in this release, native Flash videos. The Pages widget is renamed the Wiki Pages. Finally, the Photos widget is renamed the Images widget.

My Feed: A new page called My Feed will allow members to quickly and easily see the newly published content from their contacts and their communities. In addition, members can see the comments and make comments on this content.  Also included in the "My Feed" page is a microblogging capability. Members can write microblogs and view microblogs from other members.

Disk Meter: The network Statistics page will show how much disk space you have used.

Member Removal: Currently, if a member leaves a network, all content associated with that member is deleted from the network. In the May release, you can disable a member, which prevents that member from being able to access the network using their login credentials. All member content and contributions are preserved.

Invitation Management: You can resend network invitations to unconfirmed invitees.

Company Field in Profile: You can include your company name in your profile. This is useful for networks that are extranets.

Teamwork: If you are using Teamwork, we are simplifying the status values that you can assign to goals and tasks. New goals and tasks have a status of New. You will no longer need to accept a goal. You can also cut and paste tasks. Teamwork notification messages are also improved.

Stay tuned! We will post additional blog updates here on Clearvale Connect with further details about the release over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, feel free to send us any questions or comments you might have.