Yesterday we announced our new partnership with GroupSwim. Today let’s do a bit of splashing around so you can see why we’re flipping with excitement about their collaboration and community solutions.
The GroupSwim focus is on the B2B and small- to medium-sized market. At present, the feature functionality of its solutions centers on:
- Wikis,
- Discussions, and
- File sharing.
Intellicore Design Consulting is just gearing up our own value-add development around GroupSwim but for right now, let's just look at GroupSwim as a standalone solution.
Simplifying collaboration and communication
The value of a GroupSwim solution as a central repository for collaboration and communication cannot be understated. When you create a collaboration site, you create a place where people can get work done. Additionally, community sites are ideal to allow members to share ideas, ask questions, and well, get things done.
GroupSwim solutions also allow you to send email notices to all or select group members when you post new content. Conversely, a member can add certain groups to their watchlist and receive automatic notifications when another member posts new content.
Guess what? That means that you can forego back and forth emailing across a group. Instead, post a discussion or a wiki or upload a file to your group site. Then all members have access to the same information.
And what about document versions? Arg-be-gone. GroupSwim solutions provide version control. You can add comments to alert other members as to the changes you made to content. Plus, previous versions are automatically saved. If you’re like me and periodically return to the content in some parts of previous versions, then you’ll be as excited about this feature as I am.
Another cool feature is the ability to tie all three of the main content types together. For example, you can create a wiki, and upload files as supporting documents, and then start a discussion about the wiki and files.
For example, create a wiki to define a specific business process and use the file sharing capability to upload a flowchart diagram that is an addendum to the wiki. Then use the discussion feature to debate and discuss the business process. As you refine the business process, then continue to edit the content of the wiki or upload revised flowchart files. Continue collaborating and discussing until you reach the appropriate consensus.
Throughout the process, all group members have visibility into content and discussions.
Bottom line? Communication and collaboration made easy.
Also inherent in each of the content categories is GroupSwim’s intelligent search functionality that is geared to help inquisitive minds zero in on what they need among the vast ocean of information that will be created as folks use an online community solution. My next article will focus in on Search capabilities so I’ll defer that discussion for now.
What’s coming
Is GroupSwim cool or what?
This really is just the starting point.
Intellicore Design Consulting has plans to add our own value to GroupSwim solutions. It's a bit early in our development efforts to get too specific. However, I can tell you we plan on integrating GroupSwim and Salesforce.com solutions together to maximize the customer and partner portal features of both solutions.
Additionally, GroupSwim also has plans to extend the functionality of its platform. We can’t talk about that yet....except to say we’re excited about what's coming.
Until then, I’ve got a lot more to stay about GroupSwim's Collaboration and Community solutions so stay tuned. You can also view our solution information here.