IT Counts wins “Best New Web 2.0 Initiative”

Posted on June 13th, 2008 in none by David Terrar

Web 2 Strategies logoYesterday, at Web 2.0 Strategies 2008 in London, the ICAEW’s IT Counts community won the award for “The Best New Web 2.0 Initiative”. IT Counts, which is sponsored by Microsoft, provides practical IT advice for accountants in business and in practice. It is part of the ICAEW online network (ion), a new collection of web communities, powered by WordFrame, and available free of charge to ICAEW members. The institute, which is the UK’s largest professional membership organization for accountants, is providing blogs, wikis, people profiles, professional connections, the use of RSS feeds, group messaging and document management to their member network so that they can complement the physical meetings of regional and special interest groups with an online presence.
Web2.0 Strategies is the UK’s leading forum for exploring real-world implementations of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques. The conference was chaired by social media expert Euan Semple, and had speakers like Dion Hinchcliffe, President & CTO, Hinchcliffe & Company, Julie Meyer, Founder & CEO, Ariadne Capital and Jeff Schick, Vice President of social software, IBM Lotus.

Best New Web 2.0 Initiative awardCarolyn Harrington, ICAEW’s Head of Commercial Initiatives Development, Member Services, and Stuart Hall, their Online Communities Manager were there to collect the award on the Institute’s behalf from Kat Allen, Director of the Information Division of Incisive Media (formerly VNU). Kat was responsible for the event and is publisher of Information World Review, which was the co-host.

We are delighted that the community has got this level of recognition, and we expect there to be further press releases and press coverage available soon.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Hall

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I’ve been WordFraming

Posted on March 11th, 2008 in none by David Terrar

WordFrame - better web communitiesProbably the main reason I’ve been inactive on this blog for a while has been because of my involvement in ITBRix, the launch of WordFrame, as well as a major WordFrame project. Let me explain a little. First, WordFrame is an enterprise 2.0 platform that helps you build web communities and manage content, that has evolved from Blogtronix. We have been a longstanding partner of Blogtronix, but the following change was announced on February 21st:

“ITBrix LLC, formed in September 2005 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been one of the co-founders and joint owner of Blogtronix LLC, but now the two companies have decided on a friendly separation.”

As you might expect, the actual situation behind the scenes is a little more complex than can be explained in a few words in a press release. The split actually happened on 1st December 2007, and ITBrix have re-branded their version of the source code WordFrame. As well as D²C becoming a WordFrame partner for the UK and Northern Europe, which will be announced in a formal press release tomorrow, I’ve joined the ITBrix team as well. I’m really pleased to be working with the organization which includes George Athannassov, one of the co-founders of Blogtronix and ITBrix, as well as Boz Zashev the original architect of the product, Rumen Yankov, the chief programmer of the platform, and the Bulgarian based development and support team who have been working on it since 2005. From December last year we’ve been enhancing the product with some significant new functionality, and making sure our pricing works for small and medium businesses as well as larger corporations. You can find out more in the press release and at the new WordFrame website.

ICAEW's IT Counts communityThe major project I mentioned has been helping the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW) build web communities for their membership based on the WordFrame platform. We’ve been under non disclosure for quite some time, but the news finally broke last week in an AccountingWEB article when they publicised the launch of IT Counts, their community providing practical technology advice to accountants in practice and in business, which is sponsored by Microsoft. There is a growing volume of content, including Dennis Howlett and Simon Hurst who have been hired to blog there regularly, and contributors from Microsoft, the ICAEW and the membership themselves. It’s a very significant move for the Institute, and it’s great to see this kind of professional membership organization embracing web 2.0 technology in this way. I hope to explain more about what we are doing with them over the coming weeks, and we’ve already got plans to work on some case studies for publication.

Paul Fox of Neighbo.com discussing WordFrame with Boz ZashevLastly, as I write this I’m in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, talking to the WordFrame development team with our latest customer - GroupCom / Neighbo.com. I’ll explain more about the community we are helping them build soon.

Related stories:

Dennis Howlett’s take on IT Counts

Philip Woodgate’s explanation of IT Counts

 

 

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