The GroupSwim Diving Board

We just released a significant upgrade to the GroupSwim online community software.  This software has been in the works for months and the team has simply done a fantastic job!  We are all extremely pleased with the results – check it out and you will be impressed.

This release introduces two of our most requested features, several “pet” engineering features and a bunch of productivity enhancements that make GroupSwim easier to manage and more fun to use.  The major themes are described below.

Content list

Widgets:  Easily one of our most requested features.  We’ve had a steady stream of requests to provide a simple mechanism to “embed” GroupSwim content within other web applications and properties.   Widgets are our answer.  Self-service, no coding required, JavaScript and IFrame support, this is powerful stuff.  We included nine widgets as part of this release:

1. Content list: display a list of any content from your site – optionally you can even display a preview.
2. New content: post a discussion, upload a file or create a new wiki page from virtually any application or web site.
3. Groups list: showcase highlighted groups from this site, or simply create quick access to commonly used groups.
4. Member list: spotlight you star members, link to managers, or publish a list of experts.
5. Tag cloud: publish a tag cloud, or list of the hottest tagged topics on your site.
6. Content preview: feature a discussion, wiki page or file – includes previewing the full contents.
7. New content actions: publish a link to the post form, file upload or create wiki page to promote creating new content on your site.
8. Search: search  for your GroupSwim content from anywhere.
9. Sign-in/out: Communicate session status, link to the sign-in process.

To use the widgets on your site, contact us and we will turn them on for you.

Site appearance and white label controls: This was another top requested feature (the introduction of widgets made improvements in this area even more important).  With widgets, site content can be collected and used in many new and exciting ways.  Effective widget deployment also requires deeper branding and site appearance control for a seamless user experience from the widget to the GroupSwim site.  We added significant new capabilities in three areas:

1. WYSIWYG controls to create your own theme in addition to our excellent default themes.
2. New controls to customize the headers and footers – now you can make your site headers and footer match your application or web property down to the pixel.
3. White label controls allow you to remove all references to GroupSwim including the help section.  We even extended the capability to the emails GroupSwim generates – you can now map the emails to your own domain.

Restricting group membership: Thanks to Thorsten for suggesting and pushing this great feature.  You can now “restrict” a member to a selected set of groups (one or more.)  This means the “restricted” member will have no access or visibility to any other group or piece of content on the site.  This is a great feature for adding clients and consultants so they stay contained in just the group/groups you intended.

Image Lightbox: This has been Luke’s pet feature and he has done a great job.  We’ve long been dissatisfied with our image quality.  To address, Erik and Luke dug deep to tune our image processing and newly inserted images look vastly better.  But, that was still not good enough.  Luke’s question,  “Why do you have to download the image to see it in full resolution?”  Introducing the Lightbox.  Click on any image and we provide a full resolution preview of the file.  It’s slick and very handy.

Google Analytics, Webmaster tools and SEO: Now you can use your Google Analytics and Google Web Master Account with your GroupSwim site.  We also added support to control robots.txt and add your own META tags.

Of course a whole slew of bug fixes and tweaks have been applied across the site.   You can read the details of the release, here, on the GroupSwim Pool.

Enjoy and keep the feedback coming – its been great.    Also,  as a preview,  this release was actually a double-header and a couple of  amazing features will be released soon.   The team has been very busy.