Read GroupSwim's July Newsletter

Welcome to the first GroupSwim newsletter. In this and future issues, we'll share what we learn about team collaboration using GroupSwim and the latest product news. Please let us know what you think. Enjoy!

- Jason and The GroupSwim Team

One Key to a Vibrant Collaboration Site

July 2008 Newsletter

One of the advantages of my position at GroupSwim is I get to see lots of customers and their sites. It affords me the opportunity to observe what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve concluded that there is one thing that is very effective in getting people to collaborate effectively - using very specific groups to guide people on where to post discussions, documents or wikis.

I know this sounds simple but it isn’t. For example, if I’m creating a collaboration site for a professional services project, I might use these groups: Project Management Meeting Notes, Executive Interview Results, Technical Infrastructure, and Gruntmaster 2000 Training Documents. I wouldn’t use Project Planning, Technical and Training. Read more

Announcements:

GroupSwim featured on Read Write Web

ZDNet Review by Dennis Howlett

The Inquisitor Review

The 451 Group Review

GroupSwim Releases New Product Offerings

GroupSwim Update

GroupSwim has experienced fantastic growth through the first half of 2008. We achieved the following milestones:

· Completed 2 major product releases and 2 minor releases

· Updated collaboration product line to add document collaboration

· Raised additional capital

· Added 2 new Group Swimmers

· Recognized and covered by multiple bloggers and analysts

· Added to our growing list of customers

We are extremely excited about the next release of our product. We are in the process of building a wiki that allows groups to collaborate on web-based documents. The uses for this new module are unlimited, which will also have powerful sharing and permissions built-in; there will also be other goodies.

Our blog readership continues to grow. Please go to our blog, The Diving Board, to subscribe and follow us.

Finally, thanks to all our customers and friends for their continued support and suggestions. We appreciate your input and help in building a great product and company. We couldn’t do it without you.

The Killer App That Is Killing Us

Email changed the world for business and consumer alike. Imagine it; a cheap and easy way to communicate with each other without using voicemail, fax, or the post office. While a boon for business communication, email has significant flaws that we continue to live with today. So, what’s wrong with email?

1) Limited ways to prioritize what deserves reading or replying – can be overwhelming

2) Search on most email clients is terrible – can’t find what you need

3) Knowledge in emails limited to people participating directly – no good for future team members

4) Used to collaborate – something it was never intended or designed to do

There are ways dodge these problems, but they require installing additional tools and using clever processes. Read more

Implementing Collaborative Software — No Problem

I’ve been thinking about the difference between implementing a collaboration application for business versus more traditional applications like ERP, CRM, etc. (insert other acronym here). I’ll try not to be biased but I believe that implementing an application like GroupSwim is different and easier. First, let’s list a couple of assumptions and my conclusions:

Assumption #1: The amount of archived/older information that people rely on for their day-to-day knowledge-based jobs is relatively small

Conclusion #1: The need for collaboration software to integrate with older documents and information stores is minor but often overblown. I know this flies in the face of tradition, but I think it is true. From what I’ve experienced, people use a small subset of documents, resources, etc. and do most of their work from their inbox and on specific documents that are part of their current plate of work.

Read more

“GroupSwim has become the “brain” for our sales team. It delivers the information we need to sell our solution.”

Andy Jenks
Senior VP, Sales
Discovery Mining