CommonSense Technology

An open platform for growth and flexibility

CommonSense is a web application, so it runs on a web server requiring just a browser on your desktop.

CommonSense can be installed on your servers or can be hosted by Sense. In both cases we'll manage the application for you. Any patches and updates can be installed by our consultants ensuring your system is up to date.

The Technology

CommonSense is written in C# using Microsoft .Net and Microsoft SQL Server. This combination delivers a fast and flexible platform for your business. We offer integration to your existing applications such as CRM and other customer information systems to provide a single view of your customers.

Our applications use the latest web technologies such as AJAX to give a responsive and interactive application that you will enjoy using.

We use Agile development, so we share new developments, enhancements and customisation projects with you. This allows you to monitor and tune the requirements during the project. We've found this delivers a higher quality solution that really works for our customers.

This also means regular updates and enhancements to our solutions based on feedback from customers. We don't customise our solutions for any one customer, instead we share any innovations with all our customers with a powerful configuration engine that ensures you get exactly what you want.

We also offer a full set of web services enabling you to access CommonSense functionality from external web sites, portals and applications to offer complete flexibility.

Security

Access to CommonSense is controlled through a flexible user identity process. Users can log in with a user name or password, or we can link the Active Directory to automatically sign in authorised users.

We can also link to any private authentication systems, for example using SecurID or your customer identification from your support web site.

This means user management is transparent and flexible - avoiding the need for defining and managing users within CommonSense.

Ever user is assigned one or more configurable roles which defines their access rights and capabilities, for example are they allowed to add new content or review knowledge tagging.

Users are managed in a hierarchy of divisions and teams. For example you may want to organise users by geography and function with a US, European and Asian divisions each with sales, customer service and marketing teams. You can analyse usage and performance by division, team and individual.

The taxonomy organises information based on topic and includes the ability to define the roles, divisions and teams who can access information - folder by folder. You can for example have information which can been seen by all divisions but only the "experts" within the Asian Marketing team can make changes.

This means you have total access control and visibility of every action - and you can revise the taxonomy and security rules at any time to meet the changing needs of your organisation.

CommonSense supports 256 bit encryption of both web and emails to protect your valuable information.

CommonSense offers the ability for instant world wide access to information while ensuring your information assets are fully protected.

Finding Information

CommonSense uses a combination of 14 free text and logical searches to locate information accurately. All textual content is automatically indexed including office documents (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDF, text, HTML with the ability to tag information with key words, a description and a user defined lexicon to provide greater sensitivity.

The optional "federated search" module adds the ability to index external information such as external web sites, networked drives and SharePoint information. We can also support new information resources, for example automatically including information from your internal customer or order databases.

You can search using key words and phrases including support for more complex searches using boolean logic (brackets, and, or, etc)

Results are ranked using an tunable algorithm so you can prioritise using your rules.

You can also define dynamic filters using any available information about information including the type of content, size, location, language, etc. You can, for example, filter results to only show PDF documents, in US English, over 1Mb with the largest documents first.

Our goal is maximum flexibility and power - wrapped in an intuitive interface that really works for you.

Email, Phone and Enquiry Support

CommonSense includes email support to send information to customers. You can search and select information from the knowledge base into a clipboard and then send the information via email. The email interface includes context sensitive email templates and style sheets to generate high quality emails with little or no typing ensuring both accuracy and consistency. This includes a multi-lingual spell check.

Information can be tagged as internal only. This is information that your employees can view but can't be emailed to external clients.

All emails are logged giving a complete overview of every customer communication and the information sent.

The CommonSense email manager adds the ability to monitor and track inbound email. We can support any common email interface including POP3, MAPI and WebDav giving support for MS Exchange Server, Lotus Notes and other leading email servers.

Email manager monitors the configured email accounts to automatically log and acknowledge customer enquiries. Emails are assigned an enquiry id with service level and performance tracking. Replies and any bounce backs are tracked giving a full trail of every customer interaction including tracking phone calls and other channels.

Telephony can be integrated to match inbound calls to your customer database and supporting outbound dialling.

Scalable Platform

CommonSense can run on a single server with the SQL Server database, IIS web server, document store and the CommonSense application. This configuration can support up to 100 users depending on usage.

As the system grows you can re-organise the components. The document storage can be moved to a SAN, we can use an external or clustered SQL Server database and share the web application across multiple servers on a web farm supporting 10,000 or more users.

CommonSense runs on virtual servers for smaller installations, although we recommend using a shared database server to give reasonable performance.

There's no charge for moving components around to suit your needs - we'll even help you make the move free of charge.

Summary

CommonSense is based on modern, proven technology. It's fast and flexible, supporting small organisations and large enterprises in the same effective way.

It's open and designed for fast, smooth integration so it works with your existing systems.

To learn more about how we can work with you and for you, contact Sense.