ThoughtFarmer

ThoughtFarmer is a commercial social intranet software product developed by OpenRoad Communications Ltd. in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

ThoughtFarmer is collaborative enterprise 2.0 software built on ASP.NET, for on-premise use behind the firewall. ThoughtFarmer is designed to be a turnkey solution to reduce implementation time. ThoughtFarmer is recommended for Microsoft environments that can take advantage of its single sign-on with Windows Authentication, integration with Microsoft Exchange, and synchronization with ACTIVE Directory.

ThoughtFarmer appeared in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in 2008 and has appeared in Forrester analyst reports on social software and enterprise 2.0.

Early versions

ThoughtFarmer was originally created in 2005 as an intranet solution for Intrawest Placemaking, a division of Intrawest. The goal of the project was to replace the existing static intranet with a site that would "turn every user into a contributor", inspired by Wikipedia. Since then, ThoughtFarmer progressed through several iterations and was developed into product that has been adopted by organizations around the world including MEC,Electronic Arts, eHarmony, Guardian Media Group, Penn State University, and WATG.

Early versions of ThoughtFarmer included features such as profiles, commenting, tagging, search, recent activity tracker, news feed on the home page, document management, wiki-style content editing and revision control, Microsoft integration, organizational chart, rich-text editor, and an employee directory.

Version 3.0

ThoughtFarmer version 3.0 saw the addition of blogs, discussion forums, calendars, and RSS feeds. Multilingual support with a localized interface and automatic translation features were also added.

Version 3.5

ThoughtFarmer 3.5 added a Microsoft Exchange integration feature that supported archiving of e-mail distribution lists on the intranet, as well as an improved employee directory with filters, and tree-view navigation. As of June 3, 2009, the latest supported languages for ThoughtFarmer 3.5 are English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Dutch.

Version 3.6

ThoughtFarmer 3.6 released on January 13, 2010 and is the latest stable version of ThoughtFarmer. 3.6 saw the introduction of three new enhancements: Personalized Home Pages, Search Filters and customizable Groups.

System requirements

According to the ThoughtFarmer home page, basic server requirements are as follows:

  • Windows Server 2003 or 2008
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or 2008

See also

  • Comparison of wiki software
  • List of wiki software
  • Collaborative software