GroupSwim is a company whose SaaS collaboration solution uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. As an Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad finalist, the company was honored for making enterprise team collaboration fun to use thanks to features like thumbs up/thumbs down voting and its ability to monitor your favorite topics.

One of the best features in the latest version of GroupSwim is the new integrated wiki application which puts GroupSwim in more direct competition with services like Central Desktop, existing SharePoint implementations, and Confluence and less directly with other wiki providers like Wetpaint, for example, as well as with other group collaboration suites like Grou.ps.

With GroupSwim's wiki solution, you don't have to learn any sort of technical markup code. Instead, their WYSIWYG editor is easy to use and lets anyone write, share, and collaborate on documents with other team members. You can insert files, images, widgets, and tables into the wiki and if you mess something up, content can be quickly recovered thanks to the wiki's versioning feature. The wiki also offers built in access control permissions so admins can specify who is allowed to edit pages.

Another change to GroupSwim is the addition of system APIs. Where before they offered only a couple (single sign-on and member management), they now have a whole host of APIs to let you better integrate their software with other third party systems your company may be using.

Other features included in the latest update are:

• Redesigned home page for feed style information across all groups
• Hidden groups that are invisible unless user is a member of the group
• New email notification permissions let you tune who can send email notifications
• Improved auto-tagging capability
• Insert files and images directly into discussions and wiki pages
• Various performance enhancements

Why GroupSwim Works

So far, GroupSwim has been so successful in making a name for themselves in the Enterprise 2.0 space, first getting selected as an Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad finalist and more recently being selected as one of the 12 finalists out of some 85 companies to be a Preview Company at the SIIA OnDemand Conference in November.

We think the reason for the company's success goes beyond the software's feature set alone. What's really appealing about GroupSwim is how easy it is to use. After having spent years editing and uploading files to SharePoint, using GroupSwim is a breath of fresh air - it doesn't feel like work. And that's quite the accomplishment because behind the software's simple Web 2.0 interface, they offer a robust feature set which includes things like role-based permissions, private groups, support for rich media, the ability to embed both Zoho and Google Docs, the ability to add files via email, document previews on the web, suggestive search, and more.  How they managed to cram in all those features while making the software appear so easy is beyond us.

For more info on how GroupSwim works, check out this post which delves into the details of the software including its semantic features. However, the best way to get a feel for how GroupSwim works is to visit their demo sites. On this page, there are three different sites already set up for you to explore. 

GroupSwim is an innovative company which has created an intelligent community building and collaboration SaaS solution. It was mentioned here on RWW previously as one of the finalists in the Enterprise 2.0 launch pad. GroupSwim aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies. Their method of working comes from four observations of  current offerings and methods of working:

So what does GroupSwim offer? Their solution has:

• A nice Web 2.0 interface
• An open architecture that allows it to grow, adapt and morph at will
• The benefit of leveraging community intelligence
• A robust enterprise grade architecture

How does it work?

Once a user creates an account, they can create multiple communities within their account. This has two benefits - it means a business can have different communities for different parts of the business, but it also means that an individual user, with one single sign on, can access all of the groups they are subscribed to. This is all nice but not unique, GroupSwim's main benefit comes from its semantic approach and its qualitative differentiation techniques which together improve functionality and user experience.

Semantic Approach

Content entered into a discussion 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. My experience with other collaborative platforms is that the search tends to be a little clunky - often giving poor results, Groupswim's semantic search improves the search and therefore overall usability of the service.

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. Groupswim have done a nice job of capturing the two streams of rating - together the overall rating gives an improved experience - this coupled with the semantic search really sped things up in my trial.

Conclusion

GroupSwim provides a compelling offering - I can see it providing real value for organisational community building both internally and externally. Check out their elevator pitch video below.