Since this Blog really has taken shape yet, I guess I get the benefit of setting a possible tone moving forward.  In that regard, I hope this tone is appropriate, but from a platform perspective, I see nothing but possibilities for the Clearspace(X) platform in growing collaboration across disparate teams.

In my company, we are currently working to try and create less obscure lines between community initiatives and revenue.  Obviously the immediate first phase for attempts such as this are to try and merge into existing systems, while over time, if the technology is pervasive enough, it can ultimately change the systems to a new paradigm.  Given that we've only recently gone live with CleraspaceX 1.9.0 on OAS10g 10.1.3.3.0, we are unfortunately in the former stages of this process.

As such, some ideas that we had to leverage some of ClearspaceX's unique features include the following:

• Leveraging the Listener Framework and Filters to process content at create/edit time against a custom dictionary of terms and matching URL structures...and storing meta-data on the document/thread/blog post for rendering actions to take into consideration when rendering the item for display.  The hopes would be to do one of the following: provide a list of relevant links off to the side of the document that would help drive traffic towards measureable calls to action.  If we were bold enough, we could apply these meta-data instructions as a filter, and alter the appearance of the actual words in the content as hyperlinks.  This might be too intrusive to our customers, and we'll need to evaluate the nice balance between content ownership and ROI. =)

• Abstracting the Ratings Engine in ClearspaceX as a Ratings Service for all content on the website.  We've been looking at the possibility, of creating a private community visible only to Admins and WebService logins, and then creating Document Stubs into that community and capturing Ratings regarding non-ClearspaceX pages on those assets, and then surfacing the ratings to the remote sites as well through the same Web Service APIs.  Since ClearspaceX is integrated into our SSO solution, we already know that we are talking apples to apples between the 2 systems.  We just need to work out logistics of whether or not a user (who is logged in), has a "username" or as we call it "alias" when they rate...and how to handle the corner-cases that stem from that core issue.

Some others ideas that I do not have time to rant on include dynamic forum threads injected via Web Service integration, integration with internal document creation workflows into ClearspaceX, as well as leveraging Web Services to creating micro-communities for bolstering real-time sales opportunities between sales and customer seeking assistance. 

Currently, a pet project of mine is to get OpenFire setup and see what ideas come from that....

I hope this content has spurred some thoughts about how I envisioned ClearspaceX being used (at least from my perspective), but please comment and let us know what interests you.