WebCrossing Community

Community

Features

WebCrossing Community’s outstanding feature set includes message boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, chat, polls and blogs, and the modular design permits adding other applications and plug-ins when necessary.

WebCrossing Community provides the full range of interactive components you will need to create a vibrant online community. From the cornerstone discussion areas through innovative features like brainstorming, all the tools your users expect are available with a common interface and easy-to-use functionality.

With an extremely flexible structure, you can organize your site as you see fit.

  • Access Controls ensure you keep your private material private
  • User Groups make it easy to manage groups of users such as class members or instructors
  • Discussion Areas offer forum space with full administrative control
  • Post by Email! offers a convenient way for users to participate from anywhere, direct to discussions and blogs
  • Mailing Lists let you organize a forum folder as a mailing list
  • Blogs  include teasers, spellcheck, photo blogging, drafts, and a scheduled-release feature
  • Polls  offer sidebar or whole-page polls with graphic chart of results
  • Brainstorming  offers an innovative three-step process of generating ideas, discussing them, and evaluating them
  • WebMail and full email (SMTP, POP3) services are provided
  • Newsgroups provide full support for NNTP-based access

An extensive Server-side JavaScript API permits the developer to modify built-in features or extend functionality as needed. Our Professional Services Team provides a spectrum of services from simple cosmetic changes to implementation of major new features.

Performance

WebCrossing Community runs on WebCrossing Core, a high-performance collaboration system, permitting an unlimited number of simultaneous users restricted only by platform capabilities and bandwidth. The high-performance server application is implemented in the C programming language, eliminating the overhead of interpreted languages such as PHP. Additional performance is achieved by extensive use of sophisticated data caching techniques to eliminate slow disk accesses whenever possible. A single WebCrossing Core instance is capable of serving hundreds of thousands of page views per day on high-performance hardware.

For heavy load requirements, WebCrossing’s sophisticated clustering protocol makes it simple to group redundant servers for a highly scaleable and robust environment. Scalability features include distributed and mirrored server features. Unlike some mirrored systems, which may require several minutes to distribute new postings throughout the entire mirrored network, a WebCrossing Core cluster achieves complete network distribution in milliseconds.