Our Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, presents the criteria we believe to be important when evaluating technology systems to support and enable your customer community. The criteria represent six major areas:
- Capabilities within a Community
- Community Participation
- Moderation and Administration
- Architecture
- Product Viability
- Company Viability
We base our criteria on Customer Scenarios and focus on the key differentiators in our evaluation of current vendor solutions.
Each organization is different, with different skills, requirements, and architectures. You should evaluate which features are important to your situa-tion and which may be able to be traded off without harm. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns. You can use this matrix to notate the capa-bilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating, or to evaluate the capabilities of your current purchased or home-grown solution. Feel free to delete features which you don’t require and to highlight those capabilities that are of the highest priority in your environment. We hope you find this matrix useful for prioritizing capabilities as well as for collecting and organizing information about online customer community alternatives.
This updated version of the matrix reflects changes made to our Evaluation Framework, most recently updated on May 28, 2009. New items in-clude the addition of criteria relating to collaboration (“idea engines” and presence awareness), commu-nity participation (viral tools, such as “Invite a Friend/Colleague”), and technology architecture (search engine optimization / SEO and support for mobile devices).
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