RealCommunities is a web infrastructure software company in the community relationship management market (now called social software in 2004). RealCommunities offer a sophisticated, high-performance suite of products for creating, configuring, and managing large-scale web communities.

Mission

RealCommunities’ mission is to create products that enable corporations, through their web site, to proactively manage key business relationships – with and between their most important stakeholders – site members, customers, partners, developers, integrators, franchisees, distributors, employees, and others.

Vision

RealCommunities’ research into the principles of successful communities has resulted in a product design that goes well beyond the conventional products. The company’s 12 Principles of Civilization™ identifies the elements that must be present in all successful communities.

These 12 Principles have been translated into web software and comprise the RealCommunities’ CiviServer Product Suite.

Customers

RealCommunities’ customers have high volume, strategically important natural communities with shared interests and needs. They include vertical portals, corporate portals, elearning portals, eCRM environments, and exchanges.

Products

The RealCommunities’ Product Suite has been designed to be standards-based, massively scalable, and extensible. This design criteria results in web software that enable the creation and management of communities that are fully configurable and integrate seamlessly with existing content and commerce areas.

RealCommunities’ product suite is engineered using a high-performance, extensible, and scalable architectural design. It enables a wide variety of applications, including both workflow and rules-based applications, to be efficiently designed, implemented, and deployed.

CiviServer Experience™

CiviServer Experience is an application for web communities that enables member to member knowledge and experience sharing. It allows members to identify those with relevant experience, engage them in a structured relationship and reward them by helping them develop a reputation.

CiviServer Producers Workbench™

The Producers Workbench™ is a unique, end user community customization and management tool. It is fully integrated with all applications and with CiviServer Fundamentals. Features include a community producer oriented HTML based environment, monitoring of the community through high-level statistical analysis of community activity, advanced member management, and total customization.

CiviServer Fundamentals™

A set of core community applications that includes sophisticated Identity management, groups, discussion management, reputation management, and environment management all integrated with each other and other site elements including content, e-commerce, and personalization.

CiviServer Community Applications

Community Applications implement a particular community purpose. Each application uses functions provided by the various managers in CiviServer Fundamentals. Applications are easily built using the Community Development Kit APIs.

Community Development Kit

The Community Development Kit is a set of API's, tools, and documentation that lets customers and third parties develop specialized, fully featured community applications. These applications can access the services provided by CiviServer Fundamentals and be managed using the Producers Workbench.

Technology

CiviServer™ uses Java, HTML, XML, JDBC and other J2EE-compliant technologies. Consequently, it runs on any operating system that supports Java such as Sun Solaris™ or Windows NT™. The product interfaces with JDBC compliant databases such as Oracle and Java compliant web servers and application servers like Netscape (iPlanet) Enterprise Server and BEA Systems’ Weblogic.