General Consultant Discussion

**Ready, Set, and Raring to Go** VMWare announced the end of life for Socialcast with paid subscriptions ending May 2019. We were not surprised. _We expected it._ In 2016 a search for new feature-rich products that would support our groups current and future growth began. This search covered many features, many products, and many platforms. The advanced application features of these products quickly demonstrated to us that VMware was not making any significant updates to the Socialcast product, and hadn't for years. In 2017 the 90 Minds Platform and Knowledgebase Committee was formed to continue the in-depth review and testing for a product that would not only replace Socialcast, but also provide the additional features needed for the growth and support of our group. After many months of reviews, demos, and test sites we are very close to selecting a new platform. The final recommendations will be presented to the Board in August for approval. We will announce the new platform in September and quickly begin conversion and testing. Education classes for the new platform will be held online and at Meeting of The Minds 2019. We expect final conversion and go live to be completed well before the May 2019 deadline. As part of this platform move, we will convert the history of Socialcast postings to a read-only resource accessible from the new Platform. Yes, every last one of them all of our rich sharing of knowledge and quirky sarcasm too. If you have questions, please feel free to post them in this thread or email me directly, moira.goggin@90minds.com. We will announce the list of finalist _after_ the board meeting in August. See? We got this covered. We're the Minds. Your dedicated Platform and Knowledgebase Committee: Phil McIntosh, Steve Iwanowski, Robert Wood, Michelle Forsey, Jeff Schwenk, Therese Logeais, and me, Moira Goggin

Thank you all for putting in the time and effort to do the planning and research on our behalf.

Nice job everybody. I'm glad you're finally see light at the end of the tunnel.

Great work staying ahead of the curve. I really appreciate your efforts and all the hard work that must have gone into the search and testing.

All this research and your day job too! Thank you.

As President, I want to add a couple things. This toolset is central to the ""Three Pillars of 90 Minds"" that we introduced at MOTM 2017: Pillar 1 - Functional assistance to members this incorporates social cast, knowledgebase and file sharing Pillar 2 - Our value to 90 Minds members and extending the member's value to their customers Pillar 3 - 90 Minds branding and marketing While Socialcast has worked okay, the connections to Evernote and Dropbox aren't easy enough to be broadly used. Search capabilities in all three are too weak. Security of the tools limit what we can do for communities we could expand into where confidentiality is important. Moira and Robert had done some investigation during 2016, and when our strategy outline gelled in Feb 2017, we could get some focus behind it. Hiring Moira as 1/2 time Exec Dir was also a key part. You would not believe all the potential candidates that are out there. Nearly all of them have serious drawbacks, but the committee members spent time on all before they could rule them. It has been a real slog. These committee volunteers have done an amazing job including countless hours donated to ""the cause."" Thanks to all of you!