Hyderabad Technology Blog

BarCamp #3 at Hyderabad- theme 'Web2.0 Communities'

(Reposted from other blog)
We are having the third BarCamp at Hyderabad. On Dec 16th. At Infosys. The theme for this camp is- "Web 2.0 Communities".

Partly inspired by some of the pioneering work put up by the likes of Orkut in the social domain, and the likes of Fon networks in the commercial domain (though this latter is not in an applications context). There seems to be quite some steam and opportunities in the Web2.0 communities. We ourselves (at Pramati) built the Support portal with many Web2.0 concepts in it- mostly relating to Rich UI and RIA, but one key function built on communities concept...

The portal is meant for all our clients. IN each client organization there are many users that would interact with us for Support. IN normal support delivery models a list of authorized users is maintained. This needs painful housekeeping. IN our support model, as we work with ISVs a lot, we do not have a limit on number of users that can call in from our client organizations. So the best mode for us was to let the client organization configure their users. And to minimize housekeeping fiurther, we wanted to allow any user to "invite" others to join th esupport portal. This would send a mail thru our system, an dth einvited user can by just a few clicks register and become a user. No contacting their sysadmin/relationship manager, no filling up long forms, no approavals from us, no administrative tasks from our support admin.

Further, as multiple clients access the portal, we wanted each user to have a complete view of his/her organization's interactions with our Support. The user can see all deployments and projects from just his/her organization. Can see all users from the organization. And see all cases reported by anyone from the organization. All built off the user communities we have. Eachusert essentially belongs to their parent organization (that we identify by the email domains- works for us as corporates are our clients). Further, users can invite other registered users also to get access to specific projects- which is often the case when dealing with vendors. Some company provides a solution to a client, who runs it on our server. Here the solution provider is not our client- but is essential in resolving any issue that may come up at the client.

IN short a nice case of using user communities effectively to adress a biz problem. We hope to see more such cases and scenarios at the BarCamp. And some demos. And prob some general sessions relating to Web2.0 as well. A parallel Entrepreneural track is also planned- this will be driven by the Bootstrappers' Hyderabad chapter.

Happy Camping! (Now, anyone there with a good idea for a session? Do add it. Even better, do register yourself as a speaker, to deliver the session!)

posted by Ramesh L. @ 7:49 PM