GroupSwim Now Provides Three Coordinated Offerings
by Bill Ives
I have written about GroupSwim before (see for example, GroupSwim Moves Deeper into Enterprise Collaboration). Last week I had a chance to catch up with Jason Rothbart, their VP of Customer Success. He covered how they have expanded their product line in response to market demands to provide three offerings, all built on enhanced versions of their original platform. There is now GroupSwim Collaboration, GroupSwim Community, and GroupSwim Workbench.
GroupSwim Collaboration is aimed at internal organizations and teams as a productivity tool. You can create a series of groups that map to your organizational structure, geographies, roles, or other factors. It is highly configurable so you can dynamically create and change groups as your business or project grows and evolves. There are many permissions levels so you can have groups that are totally open or ones that are hidden for complete privacy and security. You can set up wiki pages, store and share files, and have internal discussion forums. The wiki has WYSWYG editing and you can easily insert links, images or video. The Collaboration product is priced based on registered users. Here is an example of a collaboration screen.
GroupSwim Community software is designed to support external, customer-facing sites to provide a way for your customers to collaborate with you and each other. It has the same flexibility and ability to set multiple permission levels as the Collaboration product but is optimized for community use. You can set up discussion forums so customers and partners can ask questions, share experiences, and get work done. This process dynamically also creates a knowledge repository. The software automatically rates every single discussion, which helps you see what people are interested in or concerned about. The Community product is priced based on page views. Here is an example of a community page.
GroupSwim Workbench provides APIs and widgets to extend the base functionality. It is open to third party developers and IT departments who can produce customized white label versions of GroupSwim. The APIs are grouped by three levels of functionality: site, group, and user. You can also embed these widgets into other existing products and web sites. Creating a new widget is easy. The software generates html code based on your configuration choices so no coding is required by the user. Here is a screen showing a number of the widgets.
I like these moves as they have recognized the difference in enterprise and Web use and optimized both the features and pricing for both functions. GroupSwim has also moved the product completely to the cloud and has done away with their own servers. They now use virtual servers rather than a data center so they can scale indefinitely. More servers can now be added with the click of a button. Jason said their customer base has been doubling every few months so this capability is important.
Future plans include a question and answer capability. When users ask a question, the system can detect if the same question or a similar one has already been asked to avoid repetition. As a user is typing in a question, similar ones are displayed on the fly. The feature includes natural language processing to clarify issues. This feature will be especially relevant for discussion forums in both products. It is enabled by the GroupSwim auto-tagging capability.
It is nice to see the product line continue to evolve to meet market needs. Jason said that GroupSwim was named a Cool Software Vendor for 2009 by Gartner. Other new features include expanded search capability, an improved watchlist, and expanded ability for content moderation. Check out their blog, The GroupSwim Diving Board, for further release information.
