This week, I had a chance to talk again with Jason Rothbart, VP of Customer Success at GroupSwim. I have written about them before, see GroupSwim: Enhancing Online Enterprise Communities. Their initial focus was on consumer web communities to provide a better solution to mine the information in online forums. They began to move to enterprise solutions when we first talked as they supported communities inside and outside the firewall. Now they have taken a more significant step into Enterprise 2.0 with the enhanced ability to support file collaboration . As a result, they have divided their product line into two segments, GroupSwim Collaboration for internal collaboration and GroupSwim Forums for external customer forums.

Now you can now add files in three ways: by emailing them into the site, adding them to a discussion, or uploading them directly. Once the files are in the system, GroupSwim provides:

- Tagging and indexing for easy discovery using search
- Capability to managing multiple versions of the document
- Suggestions for related files and discussions based on what you are reading
- Previewing from the web so you don’t need to download in order to see what is there

These are all useful features for the business user. When a file is added, GroupSwim applies their underlying semantic analysis engine to auto-generate tags and complete the indexing. They also auto-generate the related files and discussions through the same engine. A page is generated for the file that includes:
• Document preview and search
• Upload new versions
• Start a related discussion(s)
• Review auto-generated tags and add more
• Identify top contributors to the file
• Browse related content

The screen shot below shows a sample file page. It begins with a description of the file, the previewed file is shown under that and related discussions below the previewed file. The many other actions are available on the right column.

[photopress:GS_file_page.jpg,full,pp_image]

Jason mentioned a high-tech company that started using GroupSwim as the shared collaboration site and knowledge base for their sales force. This client has a complex product and a geographically dispersed sales force. The head of sales was constantly answering the same questions. Now, there is common platform for handling these issues. It was so well received in sales that the rest of the firm is adopting GroupSwim for their internal collaboration and will be rolling out the external Forum product for their customers. This is a great example of an Enterprise 2.0 success story.

One of the GroupSwim’s core features is its semantic engine for understanding and conveying content relationships in a variety of ways. They enhanced their semantic search to automatically check spelling, stemming, and suggest terms to help broaden or narrow your search. Jason showed me an example of all the features. You can see a sample search screen below. Under the search field, you can see the suggestions for narrowing the search. The icon in front of the results glows green to represent content that has high traffic and importance. You can link to other content with the tags on the right side, as well as team members who are experts on the terms you are searching. GroupSwim correlates the tags, the people that post the content, and the group’s reaction to the content to automatically determine experts by topic.

[photopress:GS_search_results.jpg,full,pp_image]

I liked the screen layout and the simplicity of the system, as even I could grasp it quickly. Here is another great example of a tool that started on the consumer web and evolved into an enterprise application. There is more in store. They plan to offer a wiki capability soon. It will come with all the features described for file pages. A future thought is a decision page. You could certainly use their discussion pages for this now but this enhancement would be a new page type that is optimized to support a the decision-making process. It would include features such as reminders, time lines, and voting. I think it could be a very good next step to make GroupSwim even more useful within the enterprise. They have a GroupSwim blog, The Diving Board, to provide more details on current and next steps.