Quandora: an update on the product development

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Login in Quandora

Our team is working hard on the product these days. And it shows! Most of the important functions are already working and, maybe even more important, the foundation is ready for implementing complex mechanisms. From the very first line of code that’s been written, we had in mind the long-term evolution of the product. That is to say, no “quick and dirty” whatsoever: everything has been done with a deep preoccupation for extensibility and scalability. (That’s normal: if you knew our lead developer, you’d understand that he would have a heart attack to see unoptimized or unclean code in his repository!)

Let’s see what we have at this time.

Login in QuandoraAccounts and login

We implemented the OAuth2 protocol in the authentication module of Quandora, therefore you can theoretically use any OAuth2-compatible account provider to login to Quandora. Login using GoogleApps and SalesForce available at this time. (and also, Quandora offers its own user account management). Next in line: Yammer.

Except for Quandora’s administrators, a user is linked to a specific domain (see below).

Multi-tenancy

Yep, Quandora is effectively, as per now, multi-tenant. It allows separating and managing safely the customer’s knowledge bases, profile, users, and specific setup. Obviously, these functions are only available to Quandora’s administrators and some of them to customer’s administrators.

Manage domain - moreWe can currently attach to a customer information such as:

  • start and end date (corresponds to the customer’s subscription)
  • name, description, website, allowed domain names
  • users
  • we can choose whether to use a Markdown or HTML editor to edit posts
  • we can choose a graphical theme between the 10 available by default; or override the CSS to further customize the look and feel
  • we can define specific badges. Yes, we know every company have its unique culture and motivation pattern.
  • … and a lot of other information in java properties format :-). Geekish, but powerful.

Create knowledge baseKnowledge bases

Once the domain corresponding to its company is created, the customer can start creating his Questions and Answers bases.

And this is the final administrative step: now your company can use Quandora and get in touch with its inner knowledge đŸ™‚

Theme 1
As said at the previous paragraph, we can pick up a graphical theme

 

Theme 2
Same customer, different theme

 Questions and Answers

Almost all the features concerning Question and Answers are there: you can ask, answer, edit answer, comment, vote up and down, favorite, validate answers. The tag system is also implemented: simply typing a tag in the ask question form will automatically find it if it already exists, or create it otherwise.

Speaking of tags, we decided to introduce a notion of “tag category”. This allows to create special tags that can trigger special behaviors. Example: a category named “audience” (with entries such as “public”, “customer”, “internal”) can require a higher level of credentials in order to be used. Indeed, it’s usually the management who has the authority to state the level of confidentiality.

View Question and Answer

Next steps

The reputation system is work in progress, and it’s a matter of days for it to be functional. We are careful to make the reputation system as flexible as possible, to allow customers to define their own “privileges weight” and rules function of their business and culture. While, of course, offering ready to use default configuration for those who don’t want to deal with this kind of complexity.

We are also working on an easy to use and fast import-export system. For us, it’s one of the key features of Quandora. It will allow to easily pre-populate a knowledge base with existing information. Either extracted from the customer’s own IT system (mailing lists, CRM, business applications, etc); or from Quandora’s “meta” knowledge base, centralizing knowledge from all the customers that participate to the knowledge sharing.

Last but not least, we are working on plugging in Apache Lucene/Solr to the product. We intent to use this powerful product to provide users as many search tools as possible, to help them reach the information they are looking for, even when they’re not sure about what that is.

All in all, stay tuned: Quandora will be available to test very soon!

 

Looking for a great way to ask questions and build knowledge with your co-workers? Quandora enables simple, efficient knowledge sharing with your team, way more fun than a mailing list or a forum. Try Quandora

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