Last week I spent Sunday through to Tuesday in Plovdiv, helping George Athannassov, Boz Zashev and the team meet and talk to some of our new partners. I spent time getting to know Eric Anderson of Parnassus Group, the developers of WebCommunityForum.com, BlogBusinessSummit.com and a number of other communities. I was finding out about the kind of social media consultancy that they do, and some of Eric and founder Steve Broback's history running conferences for Pagemaker and Photoshop, while he quizzed me about WordFrame's future plans. We had too short an overlap before he had to head back to Seattle.

We spent more time with the Synergy3 team of Vicki Tambellini, Tim Liu and Liz Dietz. I'm very impressed with Vicki and Tim's plans and what they are doing with their research and consulting company, and with how well Liz is building their www.edu1world.org community. We had some in depth discussions about our experiences creating community sites for the ICAEW, our other customers, as well as our company and partner strategy. We are not building a conventional sales force for WordFrame, but will always sell the product through a network of partners and consultants of varying sizes. Some of our partners are one or two person consulting firms, with experience in a particular sector, or geography, while others are larger firms adding the WordFrame platform to their portfolio of products on which they build solutions. We have many years experience of managing partner programmes, as well as being on the receiving end of good and bad channel marketing, so we know both sides of the fence well. We've put together a very flexible approach to handle the differing requirements. We aim to build a comprehensive partner ecosystem, with a strong culture of community, teamwork and sharing materials, practical ideas, and approaches that work.

We spent a lot of time talking about the product and our future roadmap for WordFrame? - which is much more than just release 2.0 of our product. The next version is a complete re-write, combining both the current functionality of the WordFrame Community product, with our .NET based Content Management System (CMS), in to a powerful web publishing platform. We are using the latest .NET 3.5 technology, and have an ever growing wish list of functionality that we'd like to add. We'll be publishing more on the structure and roadmap soon. After spending those days together discussing everything in detail with us, and looking at the core of WordFrame? with Boz, it's chief architect, Vicki wrote to me and said:

"The WordFrame development team is the best team that I’ve ever seen. Not only are they a highly competent group of individuals, they are a well-disciplined team. The team approach that they have created along with the rigor of their process, the visionary leadership and the quality engineering will ultimately assure customers that they are using a product that they can trust. The transparency that has been built in to the support database is unparalleled in the industry. The WordFrame team is delivering what others have simply been talking about!"

High praise indeed - but I had exactly the same impression when I first met the team in Plovdiv.

Following these face to face sessions, we had more successful online sessions with Jerry Bowles and Mark Lazen of SocialMediaToday and then Paul Chaney of the International Bloggers and New Media Association. I was pleased to hear Paul say of WordFrame:

"The term 'no stone unturned' comes to mind - no matter where you look, it's all been thought through."

The partner network is growing very nicely.

Technorati tags: WordFrame, Enterprise+2.0, blogs, wikis, partners, Synergy3, Parnassus+Group, SocialMediaToday, social+media, IBNMA, blogging, new+media