October 3rd, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 and business collaboration
Update: I hit “publish” before the article was completely finished, so I’ve added some images and updated some links. I can’t pull the post without it leaving a trail behind it, so I may as well just own up now and say, “whoops, sorry”.
GroupSwim Collaboration, in a nutshell, is a SaaS social and business collaboration tool, solution, application - whatever you want to call it. With “Collaboration“, it’s a hosted service by GroupSwim which could well be used as a replacement for SharePoint. Although it doesn’t have all the features of SharePoint, it still works extremely well, if not better, than SharePoint in small to medium enterprises.
There are many key features of Collaboration: the main one is that it appears in forum and group form. It can be a central point of contact from a customer’s perspective to get in touch with after-sales care. With forums and groups, even wiki functions for small enterprises and businesses, there are some obvious similarities with Google Groups with some exceptions. One person can be part of different groups, and with AJAX and Web 2.0 (or as it’s an enterprise web application, Enterprise 2.0) style for the site, it boasts over-over tabs to get more detail on something before you look.
It can be served along side these features as a document repository. You can directly upload to a group, forum or wiki, attach to discussions you’re having with work colleagues or consultants, clients and customers, or email them in using your unique GroupSwim email which is provided for you.
But… the documents aren’t stored in GroupSwim. Everything’s taken through the wires to Amazon S3 which significantly increases repository security and decreases bandwidth costs.
Every file has a unique page - just as SharePoint does. However what interested me was the enterprise social network feel to it. It has a version tracker and a download counter, whilst behind the scenes it’s being indexed word for word, byte for byte. Because not everybody had the available plugins for viewing the documents, they use an API available from Scribd which provides the ability to access and preview those documents in full.
Web 2.0 features and the integrated wiki –>
Amongst many things, Zack Whittaker is a good-for-nothing, pink-sock wearing,
tea drinking, British student at the University of Kent, Canterbury, on the south-east coast of England. Currently in his second year, he decided to change courses to BA (Hons) Criminology and Social Policy, because he got bored with computer science.
Have a look at his public biography and work disclosures of his current and past industry affiliations.
Fire off an email if you feel like sharing a story, or just feel a bit lonely and want a chitty chat and a virtual hug or Leave a voicemail.
