Businesses worldwide rely on Premiere Global Services (PGi) web-based solutions to send over 60 million automated communications a day. If you’ve received an emergency weather alert or traded stocks and gotten an electronic notice, then you’ve done business — indirectly — with PGi. PGi has released a Communications Operations System (COS) API, that provides application developers with an easy way to build robust, monetized applications.

At the core of the release is PGiConnect. PGiConnect is the company's new online community workspace for software developers, system integrators, customers, resellers, and partners. PGiConnect is an online community that allows developers to access Premiere Global's full API Suite, development materials, and examples to create business applications using audio conferencing, voice, email, fax, and SMS messaging technologies.

The objective of the project was to foster a Developer Community around the release of the PGi COS API with tools that meet the competitive feature set in current Web 2.0 enterprise community experience and exceeds the community experience within the specific PGi competitive set.

Premiere Global (PGi) is transitioning its business and moving to a higher competitive ladder. Where PGi has long been known for leadership in both service excellence and absolute dependability regardless of scale, the traditional on-demand and response communications business is fraught with both a cost-per-transaction pricing model and high degree of one-off customizations that carry a high overhead. The PGi business transition — underway now — moves PGi from this cost-per-transaction model to a subscription model based on standardized components and characterized by a partnership versus a vendor relationship.

The standardized communications components—built on PGi’s open source platform and delivered to subscribers and qualified technology partners through its API — sit at the heart of the transformation. This transformation leads to the end-goal of PGi’s outward facing developer community: PGi subscribers and developers able to self-serve, to build on the PGi COS API and augment their own businesses through the implementation of highly reliable, scalable on-demand, and response communications services.

For PGi, creating the desired experience for developers means simultaneously achieving two fundamental objectives:

1. For its internal (employee) base, the development of an interface to the activities, needs, suggestions, and actual use of its API and self-service portal by developers;
2. For all external constituents—including customers, developers, partners, and integrators—the ability to benefit through a subscription based access to the PGi COS API and resources.

It is naturally presumed that any such community will offer appropriate data safeguards, access controls, and reporting. Additionally, PGi calls out (5) specific aspects as success criteria in its requirements document.

Sharing Knowledge Internally
The proposed PGi Developer Community is a persona-centric (profile oriented) solution that allows internal constituents to share knowledge as they facilitate the development of new, monetized applications.

Gathering Customer Intelligence
The PGi Developer Community must facilitate interaction between PGi and its external constituents that leads to a better community for developers and a stronger set of new applications built on the COS API.

Building the Brand
The PGi Developer Community is a fully branded environment, built in accordance with the guidelines of the PGi core brand.

Building Lasting Customer Relationship
The Developer Community directly facilitates long-term relationships by providing a supportive environment inside of which monetized applications are built and certified.

Generating Sales
The PGi Developer Community is integrated with other PGi lead sources: it enhances the value of internal sales efforts for the benefit of both PGi and its participating developers.

The Community Implementation

The PGi API Developer Community was built on the Jive Software “Clearspace Community” platform. Jive Software is a leader in both vision and execution within its competitive set. FG SQUARED has deep experience with this platform and is a reseller of Jive Software products.

Beginning with the out-of-the-box Jive Software Clearspace platform, FG SQUARED worked with PGi’s business objectives and the Clearspace platform’s extensibility options to develop a community that tightly matched the needs of the PGi COS developer community. The following represent the kinds of considerations and efforts applied:

Clearspace Groups
Rather than implementing the standard Clearspace “Projects” feature set, FG SQUARED focuses on the newer “Groups” feature, available in Clearspace V2.5+. We chose this in order to drive member self-organization around topics and thereby facilitate (and encourage) the use of associated discussions, wikis, and blogging within this group context.

Widgets
PGiConnect extensively uses Widgets and Clearspace theming options. As an example, FG SQUARED created a modified HTML widget that allows the rapid, easy insertion of modules on pages throughout the site that use custom HTML and supporting code to pull in video and image content, enhancing the ability of the community to deliver and share higher density information (multimedia versus text).

Administrative Tasks
FG SQUARED made a variety of modifications to the core administrative tools so that repetitive tasks are automated and/or streamlined. For example, PGi employees are automatically added to an “internal” (PGi only) group after sign-up verification. The benefit of this modification extends beyond simple administration: it also ensures that PGi employees are always properly identified (i.e., ensures full disclosure) when posting content on the site.

Challenges
The challenges faced in this rapid rollout were typical (and expected): primary among them is the ongoing issue of IE6 compatibility with CSS-driven, template-based applications. Because IE6 is an important corporate platform, and given the adoption of IE7, Firefox V3, and Chrome within the target developer base, cross-version design compatibility posed significant—though quite solvable—challenges.

FG SQUARED rolled out the PGi API Developer Community, start to finish, in about 6 weeks: This was driven by PGi’s requirement for a simultaneous API launch (itself driven by more complex internal timelines) and the opening of the community. FG SQUARED, working closely with Jive Software, successfully met this requirement. Subsequent to the initial launch, we built the community further out based on the prioritization of the developer community itself.

Moderation will be automated throughout the community, supplemented with PGi-sponsored online community managers trained by FG SQUARED. The initial rollout will include a complete dashboard analytics reporting system that presents engagement and similar metrics to the PGi internal constituents and business units.

Within the two weeks of launch, the first member threshold (200 validated members) had been achieved. The community launch is considered a success at this point with metrics and evaluation now turning to the use of the community, the types of opportunities created, and ultimately the number of new monetized communications application built and delivered through the PGiConnect COS Community.