I spend a lot of time online visiting group forums and looking up information in knowledge bases. It’s a bit like panning for gold. Sometimes you strike it rich – but many other times you come up with a bust.
Why? Because many online resources lack good search capabilities. Searches and tags for many solutions lack good intelligence to find what’s truly important. Additionally, most tags like a relationship to others.
That’s why I’m loving GroupSwim.
Search
Its wiki, discussion, and file-sharing solutions use semantic search to create relevance and relationships between information. The solution goes beyond semantic search though, to include tagging, ranking , and expertise to give you intelligent answers to your queries.
Autotagging
Auto-tagging is another cool feature of GroupSwim. As you type in information, the system automatically suggests tags based on your content. Then you can select the tags you want and add new ones.
One advantage of this is it lends itself to introducing some conformity into the tagging. The other more obvious one, is that auto-tagging sometimes suggests tags you might not have considered.
Preferred tagging and synonyms
One of the features I love best is GroupSwim’s preferred tagging. Related to this is the solution’s ability to allow you to set synonym or tag types. You set these for your entire site or by groups. For example,
Opportunity is a synonym for Deal.
Salesforce is a type of software.
Sales-automation is a type of business-process.
Ranking and expertise
GroupSwim solutions also give members the ability to rank content. Just as importantly, it allows members to rank the expertise of contributors by voting on posts and responses.
Summary
As quickly as information can go forth and multiply, having the ability to search among the plethora is important. GroupSwim provides the means for intelligent search for intelligent people so that you can find the gold nuggets you need.
How cool is that?
Stay tuned. I’ll have lots more to say about GroupSwim solutions in the coming weeks.