1. True Role-Based security – okay, that’s a bit geeky sounding but what it means is that you can create as many “roles” as you want, like “resident”, ”board member” and “social committee chairperson”, and then assign a unique set of abilities to each of those roles depending upon exactly what you want them to be able to do on the web site.  Then you just assign people to these roles (that’s right, each person in your community can belong to as many roles as they need) and the system automatically takes care of letting them see and do only the things they are allowed to see and do on the website.  Pretty powerful stuff.

2. Unlimited copies of each feature – so, let’s say you really like the Events Calendar on your website where residents can find out what activities are coming up in the neighborhood, but now you want to have a separate calendar that is only for the members of the Board to track their important dates.  Easy, just make another “copy” of the Events Calendar feature and only give the Board role (see, there’s that cool role thing again) the rights to see this copy.  You can do this with almost every feature we offer which gives you a lot of flexibility to create special “sub-sites” within your main website for groups within your community.

3. Less clicking and fewer page reloads – we have implemented a brand new navigation layout in Elite to keep you from having to click so many times to get to the information you want, and when you do click, there is a good chance that the information you are looking for will popup without having to reload an entire new page in your browser thanks to a technology called AJAX.  Both of these things are designed to make using your website quicker and easier for both administrators and residents.

4. Dragging, Dropping and Popping – a couple of other things we have done to make using the website easier (and more fun) is to make use of “Drag and Drop” for reordering things on your website (like the menu for example) and Pop-up administrative screens that let you quickly add or edit things without having to go off to a new page and lose track of where you were.  Now, you can make your changes and presto, you are right back where you were, ready to carry on.

5. Easy multi-site management – this one is great for those portfolio managers out there, working hard to keep board members and residents in all of their communities happy and up to date.  Now you can not only easily hop from one of your community websites to another with a single step but also you can quickly post information or send out important eMail Bulletins to all or select residents across many communities from one place using centralized content publishing.  This will make the job of communicating with all your boards or residents so much easier and quicker than ever before.

I hope you like some of these things as much as I do.  Keep chekcing back here for more information about the AtHomeNet Elite website service.

For one night AtHomeNet decided to forget all about HOA websites and go watch the Gwinnett Gladiators put the hurt to the Charlotte Checkers in some good, clean local AA Hockey.  Friday was “local business” night so we got a block of seats for AtHomeNet folks and their family.  We were very excited to have 35 folks show up and enjoy a great night of hockey.   Susan even won a Gwinnett Gladiator ball cap in the drawing.  Good times.

Jeanette takes the court!

Did you know that one of our AtHomeNet Family Members is a local Tennis Star ?  Jeanette Payne plays on a terrific team here in Atlanta and their team made it in to the finals this year! Jeanette also did a greata job representing AtHomeNet at the local CAI Georgia tennis event earlier this FALL.  All things tennis, well, that is Jeanette!  You go girl!

We started with a sit-down lunch and then jumped right into 4 tracks of 12 training courses on a variety of aspects of both the existing (A1) and the upcoming (Elite) AtHomeNet community and management company website service.  Classes covered topics for both the beginner and more advanced users as well as role-focused classes to help boards and committees as well as association managers.  

We were particularly happy to have one of our favorite speakers, Chip Yonkee, return for the 4th year in a row.  Chip is a client here in the Atlanta area and is the administrator of 4 AtHomeNet websites including one for his community, Tuxford HOA.  Chip is always a crowd favorite and does a great job of showing folks some neat things that he has done with his websites and some great lessons he has learned about how to get community buy-in and increase resident adoption of the website.  

For the first time this year we setup 3 “one-on-one” training stations that were staffed by some of our expert support folks so attendees could get some customized help, tips or training on any area of their particular website they wanted.  Finally, another new item this year was that we provided a 3-DVD “box set” to all attendees that had all 12 training classes pre-recorded so they could go back and watch any that they might have missed.  We had a few of the DVD sets left over and are selling them for $12.  If you are interested, click here.

Everyone from AtHomeNet had a great time meeting some of our clients and getting to talk with them face to face.  We already have some all new ideas for next year so if you didn’t make it this time, we hope to you see in 2009!

Today we officially started taking registrations for the AtHomeNet 2008 Training Camp.  Each year for the past 4 years we have invited our clients from all over the country to come spend a day with us learning and sharing.  We have educational sessions (12 this year) for everyone from brand new community website administrators to experienced pros who have been with us for years.  Lunch is included and you can meet and interact with other community website administrators as well as many of the AtHomeNet staff members (sorry, the security staff won’t be attending).   In addition to the group sessions, this year we will be adding some “one on one” booths where you can sit down with an AtHomeNet Support or Graphics Design expert and go over your website asking specific questions or getting suggestions on content, layout and graphics.

We always have a great time talking with clients at these events, many of whom we have never met face to face before so if you are a client we hope to see you there. (we even give away some nice gift certificates at the end)

The charge is $30 per person (all inclusive) and space is limited so if you are interested, click here to register to attend our training camp.

Here is a little video we did with some attendees at the 2007 Training Camp.

Jeff Sanders