GroupSwim is a great collaborative group-work offering. I've reviewed what they do previously over on ReadWriteWeb. In essence their offering aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies.
I spoke with GroupSwim VP of customer success Jason Rothbart the other day, and he ran me through their new release. Before covering the changes I thought I'd briefly recap the main parts of GroupSwim's offering.
GroupSwim extends the common functionalities of similar offerings in some novel, and most importantly very useful ways;
Semantic Approach
Content entered into a discussion, a wiki page or within a file is automatically analysed and tagged with keywords. This allows better classification, better searching and a more relevant and proactive customer experience to be offered to the user. Of course users can edit, change and add to the automatically generated tags but it speeds up the process no end.
Qualitative Differentiation
GroupSwim keeps a running tally on both explicit and implicit rating of material. Explicit rating comes from user ratings as per other solutions, implicit rating comes from a host of automatically assessed criteria – how often an item is read, how many times it is on-forwarded, how long it remains open etc. In this way users get a true assessment of the quality of any piece of content.
New features
The new release includes some important functions that a group-work offering like this needs;
Wikis - Wiki offerings are a dime a dozen, GroupSwim has spent lots of time ensuring theirs is user friendly – basic functions such as editing and table creation are quick and intuitive.
Newsfeed – GroupSwim realises that in these data intensive times, having one place to asses new information is very useful. They've borrowed from Facebook and have introduced a news feed where users can see new content from across all their different groups – this content can be displayed according to the user's preference – chronologically or separated by groups.
Summary
GroupSwim is a cool offering – it's great to see them embrace the aggregative approach where by users can have a nice easy view of all their information – no matter where it comes from. Their semantic approach and the automation of some standard functions should prove an efficiency boost for their customers. Check out their fresh new video below;
Related articles by Zemanta
[..] (more on GroupSwimhere). It seems the announcement came today but this has been brewing for sometime, GroupSwim VP of Customer Success [..]