Latest and Greatest, A killer new release of GroupSwim!

Whoa, this is a big one - we’ve just rolled out a major release of GroupSwim with a ton of new features! This is a very exciting release as it greatly expands your ability to enhance visibility and information about your fellow community members, easily discover quality community content and brand your community.

The Highlights:

• Public sites:  You can now create a public version of your site with guest access.  You can switch your site to public or private at any time.  When a site is public, anyone can read but guests must register to contribute.
• Search:  We have an all-new search engine.  You can search everything on your site; subject lines, discussions, tags, descriptions, members and groups.
• Custom branding:  We opened up the GroupSwim header so you can swap in your own HTML to brand your site exactly as you want.

Details of all the new features are below.   Additionally, we have posted several tips on how to get the most out of the new features in the Tips and Tricks section of the Pool.

Enjoy,

The GroupSwim Team

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New GroupSwim Features

Public Sites

You can now create public versions of your community.   If you make your site public, anyone can read but must join to contribute.    You can switch your site between public and private at anytime.   As expected, sites that are public can still have private groups.  Read more about  configuring public sites, here .

Search

We made huge improvements by integrating a new search engine into GroupSwim.  You can now full text search discussions, tags, members and groups.   The search interface breaks out search matches across discussions, groups and members.

New Header and Custom Branding Options

Now you can swap out the GroupSwim header completely and enter your own “custom header” with your own HTML code.   This can be very useful for integrating with your website. 

This all can be accomplished from Site Settings / Customize Site Appearance.

See our great post here in Tips & Tricks on how to add your own custom header.

Refined Navigation

To accommodate the new custom header and provide easier access to all areas of your community, we refined the main navigation and included drop-downs so you can easily jump between sections of your community.  Use the “down arrow” next to Home, Your name, Groups, Help, etc to access the menus.

No more Main Group and we renamed Subgroups to Groups

Based on everyone’s feedback, we have removed the main group / subgroup model and simplified the approach.   The main group is now “General Discussions” and is treated like any other group.  You have full control over General Discussions (it’s just another group) and can be renamed or deleted if you want. 

See our post here in Tips & Tricks on how to verify and update your "General Discussions" group permissions.

Subgroups have been renamed to “Groups” for more clarity of purpose.  They function identically to before, they just have a new name.

All Discussions, All Groups, All Members

Wanted one place to see everything?   We’ve had a lot of requests for one view to look at all your discussions.  Now, from your home page if you click on “Discussions” it lists “All Discussions” across all your groups.   Similarly clicking on “Members” or “Groups” has the same effect.

Visual Browse

We have added a new way to browse members and groups.  We call it Visual Browse.  You can now browse members and groups by their thumbnail picture and name.   If you mouse over the picture, a fly-out will appear with more information regarding the member and group, including specific actions.  This style allows us to display a lot more information on the page and tends to make member and group discovery a lot easier.

Your Home Page

You will notice a few changes on your home page in addition to the refined navigation model.   We moved the home page to a “news feed” style that shows you the latest discussions and replies to discussions.   We show the new discussion or last reply to keep you up-to-date with the latest activity.

Your Profile

We further tuned your profile to make it easier to find your stuff.  We add a new groups list so you can easily see all your groups on your profile.  Second, we tuned history so you can easily see your activity by day.  Third, we added a new reputation section.   This shows feedback from your community.   We have several more enhancements coming soon in this area.

Top Contributors

On all discussion lists and the tag navigation pages, we added a new side-bar element that shows the top contributors in the group or for that tag.  GroupSwim calculates top contributors based on a variety of community feedback in addition to each members’ thumb ratings.   This feature helps identify the most respected people in each group and community.

Member Flyout

On all discussions, if you mouse over a member thumbnail, a fly-out will appear with more information and specific actions.   This provides a quick snapshot of the members’ profile and easy access to the watchlist and contact actions.