The software that runs this site is an Open Source (Affero GPL 3) web application from Concursive, called ConcourseConnect, a feature complete, enterprise ready directory, social networking, and community management application. It's kind of social networking meets business, and contains features unheard of in any other Open Source, or even commercial software today.

Read on for more...

Connect is a Java web application that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, with the PostgreSQL database and the Apache Tomcat application server. It's a "lightweight" J2EE application in that it uses servlets, but not EJB's. It was built as a very high performance application and there are ways to make it even more high performance and scalable with the commerially licensed version. For a small to medium sized site that doesn't need clustering and failover, or commercial support, the OS version is perfect.

You can download the application as pure Java source code, and very soon, as a Red Hat/CentOS rpm, or even as a VMWare image ready to run. It includes a slick, graphical installer and configurator, and installs in about 5 minutes if you know what you are doing. Maybe fifteen minutes for first-timers, of half an hour if you have no experience installing large server applications.

Connect is a big application, and a bit of a memory hog, but will reward you with excellent performance when installed on a decent box. This is an older server with a pair of AMD Athlon 1.2GHz processors and 4GB of RAM, running CentOS 5.3. I think I payed $50 for the server and another $80 for the RAM upgrade. I also installed a 2-port SATA RAID controller and a pair of 320GB SATA drives.

The Connect software provides just about anything one could want in social networking software. It is based on a kind of people, places, things, idea. There are various "things" one can create: businesses, groups, organizations, people, events, sponsors, and others. Each one of these has attributes and capabilities. So for a business, you might see tabs for:

  • Profile
  • Blog
  • Wiki
  • Forums
  • Event Calendar
  • Document Management
  • Members or Friends
  • Messages
  • Lists
  • And others...

Every person, group, or other entity has all these capabilities, and the content is reasonably well organized and searchable. There is a built-in Lucene full text indexing system underneath that provides ultra fast searches.

There is also a powerful roles and permissions system underneath that allows the owner of content fine grained control of who can read, add, modify and delete content.

If you are looking to start your own community or Intranet, ConcourseConnect is a good bet, and if you are serious about it, the commercial version adds lots of additional features, like a Management Console for controlling the community and communicating with the residents, performance and scalability mods, and even a fully integrated multi-tenant CRM for the businesses in the community.

Good stuff, you should check it out.

Full disclosure: I work for Concursive, but this really is about the coolest software in the world!