A Unique System Integrations Firm

AppFusions is a unique system integrations firm focused on Enterprise 2.0, SCRM, KM, social monitoring, and other cutting edge technologies contributing to these same industry themes.

However, our focus is more specific than that.

We focus on strengthening existing community platform offerings, providing connector “pain point” solutions to integrate key component features – such as wiki, CMS, or search and discovery features (at a minimum).

Often a community platform will provide these features, but with lesser capabilities than best-of-breed purpose-built systems that a customer may already have, and enjoy, in-house.

In fairness, community platform vendors are not desirous of creating weak(er) features in these areas. Yet, replicating engineering that independent corporations focus their entire business on is hard to achieve, and costly.

Community platform vendors focus on their key specialty areas, as they should. They mash in these features to get by, as they need to.

To provide the customer with flexibility, integration solutions with popular purpose-built systems allow platform customers to have the best of both worlds:

  • rich community features (by platform)
  • embedded integration solutions to best-of-breed purpose-built systems they already have.

Customers do not have to “rip and replace” solid E2.0 technology edge component systems for lesser capabilities.

Customers do not have to settle. They can have both in a single access system.

Examples in the Real World

Following are more specific examples on how these integrations work.

  • A community platform includes a working wiki “feature", but one that is much less powerful than for example Atlassian Confluence Wiki, one of the most popular wikis in the market. The new prospective customer has accumulated years of content on Confluence.

    • The customer is in a pickle. They want the new community platform, but they also want to keep their Confluence wiki. They do not want two systems.

    • They need an integration connector to bring Confluence seamlessly into the community platform.

  • A community platform will always have some search mechanism built-in, but often the search does not extend beyond the walls of the community platform.

    • If a corporation already has an Enterprise search and discovery appliance, there is no connectivity embedded in the community platform.

    • With integration, these capabilities can leverage the power of the Enterprise search platform, within and beyond the community platform.

    • Also, types of searchable content are increased, and advanced filtering, calibration and other heuristic/data analysis possibilities are enabled.

  • A community platform typically has some method of attaching files to notes, blogs, wiki pages, comments, etc.

    • Co-location of documents to a “note” is useful as a short-cut, but indexing, records management, and version control can pose problems. Search amongst these attachments is not always enabled automatically.

    • Integration with an existing content management system allows more timely search success from the same community server portal, not another system.

Through integrations, and friendly cooperative mutual win vendor partnerships, AppFusions’ objectives are explicitly to bridge good gaps to meet and delight shared customer needs.