ONLINE COMMUNITY PLATFORM EVALUATION MATRIX
A Blank Matrix to Facilitate Your Evaluation and Planning
By Matthew D. Lees, January 17, 2008

FACILITATING YOUR EVALUATION PROCESS

Criteria and Capabilities

Our Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms,¹ presents the criteria we believe to be important when evaluating technology systems to support and enable your customer community. The criteria represent six major areas:

• Capabilities within a Community

• Community Participation

• Moderation and Administration

• Architecture

• Product Viability

• Company Viability

We base our criteria on Customer Scenarios and focus on the key differentiators in our evaluation of current vendor solutions.

Each organization is different, with different skills, requirements, and architectures. You should evaluate which features are important to your situation and which may be able to be traded off without harm. To assist you in your evaluation efforts, we are presenting the criteria in matrix form with blank columns. You can use this matrix to notate the capabilities of the short list of products you are currently investigating.² Feel free to delete features which you don’t require and to highlight those capabilities that are of the highest priority in your environment. We hope you find this matrix useful for prioritizing capabilities as well as for collecting and organizing information about online customer community alternatives.

Online Community Platform Evaluation Matrix
(Please download the formatted PDF to view the evaluation matrix table at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/em01-17-08cc.)

This report continues...

To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/em01-17-08cc

**FOOTNOTES**
1) See “Framework for Evaluating Online Community Platforms, Version 2: How to Evaluate Solutions that Enable Online Customer Communities,” by Matthew D. Lees, January 10, 2008, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/fw01-10-08cc.

2) * By Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 2.5 License. You are free to copy, distribute, alter, and build upon this document as long as attribution is given to the Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
**FOOTNOTES**