Warning: Techie content!

Talis Engage is based upon the Talis Platform, a semantic web application platform. This means data created within Engage can be easily interlinked to other data on the web, whether managed by the Talis Platform or not.

The schematics under Engage takes advantage of the ontology and themes of the W3C submission Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). It uses Friend of a Friend (FOAF) to describe contacts and Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) to describe taxonomies such as the IPSV (an ESD standard).

What all of this means is that the information in Engage is held within industry standard structures, rather than proprietary schemas developed internally by Talis. This makes the data you create with Engage portable to other applications and sites, which in essence, future proofs your investment in Engage.

Just a quick note to tell you about the sortable search results feature in Talis Engage.

Whenever a user performs a search, they can sort the returned results using simple controls at the top of the search results display

Talis Engage provides the flexibility to choose which indexes are eligible for sorting by simply clicking the sortable option in the Index Management screen for a given index.

It doesn’t always make sense for all indexes to be user-sortable - for example, you may have an index on a full text description field that doesn’t appear on the brief display of a record. It would make little sense for the user to be able to sort on this index, as your full text does not display unless the user clicks through the brief result into the full view of the record.If you choose to make no indexes in your Engage sortable, the sorting controls are not displayed to the user at all, giving you flexibility over the configuration of your user search display.

We’ve been busy working on a new feature in Engage which allows you to better manage the people involved in your community.

The new User Account & Contact Management function separates users who can log into Engage with people out in the community that, for example, play the role of a contact for an organisation or event.

People with User Accounts can log into Engage and:

• Make suggestions, which can be later moderated by a staff member
• Edit their own records
• Perform any other actions related to the specific permissions you have assigned them within Engage, such as manage taxonomy terms or create new records. You will probably want to limit such functions to users with staff accounts.

People set up as a contact will:

• Have their name and details published along with any records they are associated with
• Level of detail published can vary from contact to contact. For example, some contacts may be comfortable with allowing a phone number and address to be published. Others will prefer these to remain private and only viewable by the system administrators.
• Receive emails via the system from citizens

Contacts don’t necessarily have to be registered users to qualify for inclusion - and if they elect to receive emails from the community these are handled by a proxy system via Engage to ensure the contact’s email address is never published and therefore protected against harvesting for spam purposes.

Of course, Engage allows the option for a person’s user account and contact profile to be linked - meaning they can act as a contact and an owner for records, devolving the management overhead of a record totally to a trusted member of the community.

If you would like a free no-obligation trial of Engage, or just some more information, please contact us - we’d love to hear from you.

Hello and welcome to the Talis Engage blog! This blog is to help you keep track of news, customer success stories and take a sneak preview of planned developments with Talis Engage. We’ll be updating the blog regularly over the coming months ahead, so keep checking back to keep informed about Talis’ new community information management product.