I am building an Intranet based site and I am using the 3 combination of EasySocial, EasyBlog, and EasyDiscuss. EasyDiscuss is similar to forum software and since StackIdeas makes all 3 extensions, I know they will enhance these products with new features moving forward. Best part is as a customer you can ask the SI team to add features essential to Social Intranet focused needs. If you do add EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss then make sure to download and install the EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss Apps. - These Apps can be found here: http://stackideas.com/apps

Awesome - thanks for the info. We did purchase the EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss items, so I'll get those installed ASAP. So I can disregard the Kunena Forum app?

Hello Brad,

Hm, not really sure what you mean by "follow categories" but the Kunena app is to render posts created by the user on Kunena Forum. If you don't have Kunena installed, you can disregard this app and use the apps for EasyBlog / EasyDiscuss

After seeing the reply from Randall M we uninstalled the Kunena forum and went with the plugin apps for EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss. Definitely gets me a lot closer to what we're looking for. The question regarding Categories is along the lines of following a user and their Articles. We have lots of articles that get put on the intranet but one user may be posting articles under various categories. So we thought it would be great to follow categories so no matter who posted and article about "Fraud Prevention" I could subscribe to the category and see it in my feed. Ideally, I would love the categories to be universal across Joomla/EasyBlog/EasyDiscuss and then wherever something posts about "Fraud Prevention" I would see it. Kind of the "build my own Intranet" of things that matter to my daily work. Maybe something could be done with Tags also. I haven't played with the various Tags in the various extensions but if those were "universal" and either able to be "followed" or "subscribed" that would be great.

For having only had EasySocial installed for the last twelve hours (issue with our install not having the zip library properly configured) we are pretty impressed with what we are seeing. I believe we're meeting again tomorrow to discuss how we might redirect our rebuild to better utilize these extensions as we really are liking what we are seeing. As mentioned above it's pretty impressive where things are today and where it could be in a couple versions from now. We're looking forward to seeing how we can make the most of it.

Hello Brad,

Thanks for the kind compliments Ah, unfortunately that wouldn't be possible currently but we may plan to enhance the integrations between EasyDiscuss and EasySocial in the future so that you'll be able to easily filter discussions from specific categories within EasySocial.

Just think of where the combination of EasySocial, EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss will evolve to in the next year to three years! The opportunities are endless.

As a motivator to add more social Intranet enhancements for collaboration the stats below will open people's eyes. With a huge shift in remote workforce, small and large companies are looking for flexible robust feature rich open-source solutions for conpany social collaboration. And StackIdeas Social Solution has a huge opportunity when it starts to become known as a viable cost effective solution compared to existing high priced enterprise social Intranet offerings.

From Wired Magazine - Recently, a Forrester Research’s US Telecommuting Forecast noted that 34 million Americans currently work from home. This number is expected to reach a staggering 63 million – or 43 percent of the U.S. workforce – by 2016. This number is so significant, it bears repeating – 43 percent of the U.S. workforce will work from home just three years from today. This is a figure too large and an opportunity too valuable for organizations to ignore.

Here is an example of a future feature enhancement for EasySocial, when combined with EasyBlog and EasyDiscuss. When you look for others to Collaborate with on the network you will get an overview of people's expertise in the LeaderBoard.

With social networks that are collaboration and question and answered based finding out who to ask your questions of is half the battle. Right now, in EasySocial users can see the top users or Leaders, but there is little indication of what the user's expertise is about, but obviously this is just the start of what EasySocial will offer. What you can see now only paints half the picture. I can see the Leaderboard features evolving to something like this below, that shows the person's expertise and points total.

Mock up of possible features in future Leaderboard in EasySocial.

Thanks for sharing Randall

That LeaderBoard concept could be pretty cool. I would love to see it incorporate some other details at a future date, as well. For example, if Jonnie frequently comments on "Debit Card" or "Internet Banking" then he start becoming a subject matter expert on those items. That way if I was looking for someone to collaborate with that has experience in those two area's he kind of surfaces. Definitely ,looking forward to the future releases although we have plenty to work with today!

Thanks for the heads up on this Brad

Hi guys,

I was really interested when I saw this post - I agree about the "build-your-own intranet" type concept that Brad is talking about. Remembering that Joomla! is, at its core, a content system rather than a social system, it would be great to ensure that the content/social ties remain strong!

I have built a recruitment jobs board using JReviews and love the UI of easysocial so have added that in too. The news feed feature is so powerful and could be incredible if you could see new/updated articles from categories you "follow" or "subscribe to" in that feed.

Is there a way that, in the EasySocial profile editor, people could select a tick-box of Joomla! categories which interest them in order to have those show on their feed? (admin to be able to select whether or not certain categories are hidden)

If it would be possible, those tick-boxes could be linked with MailChimp's list "interests" (some sort of mapping option?) so that people could see new articles on their newsfeeds, but also be added into interest groups in MailChimp for AutoResponder updates when those categories get new listings?

The MailChimp bit is a "nice to have", but to really tie EasySocial and Joomla! together, I don't think we should forget about the core purpose of Joomla! as a CMS!

hello darragh,
unfortunately such an option currently doesn't exist right now.
however we have a whole area dedicated to your ideas and feature requests at http://stackideas.com/voices
feel free to post your idea over there instead of the forum as that's the place we're monitoring when it comes to planning for feature implementation in upcoming versions.

have a nice day