We rolled out a significant upgrade to GroupSwim this week that will really increase its utility.
Performance: Most notably, we achieved a sweet performance boost with most pages loading up to 50% faster. We have been growing rapidly this year and the team did great work to improve capacity and throughput. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we completed this upgrade. We also have much more coming in the performance area so stay tuned.
Moderation: A new moderation feature is now available allowing site owners to moderate different content types (discussions, replies, files, wiki pages). This feature, if turned on, requires any submission to be approved by a manager before it is posted. The need for the feature has become more acute as GroupSwim has grown and is being used in different scenarios. One popular use case is to create a developer style community like an Application Exchange where code and application submissions need to be vetted before becoming available to the whole community. We are very excited about this feature as it expands the breadth of communities GroupSwim can address and will work great with our soon-to-be released Q&A capability.
Watchlist is now Following: From Day One, GroupSwim users could follow people, discussions, files and wiki pages via their watchlist. We felt the feature was under-utilized and did some research to figure out why. In short, it was too buried and a bit misunderstood. Easily fixed. We did three things to make this feature more prominent. First we renamed it to the more popular “Following” (thank-you Twitter). Second, we added a “Following” feed to the home page to improve visibility. Third, we exposed more data on followers to provide another measure of popularity. For example, users can now see how many followers they have.
Search: One of the most killer aspects of GroupSwim is our search. However, in the past, the search box was only on the home page and group home pages. Not anymore. We’ve put search boxes everywhere so our customers can search where ever they want, when ever they want. And, the search is contextual based on where they are in the application. This change is going to be a big time saver for our customers.
Internet Explorer 8 Support: We added official support for Microsoft’s latest browser. It is just taking hold out in the world, but we wanted to get ahead of the curve and certify on it anyway.
Of course we made a number of other tweaks and addressed a few nagging bugs. The team definitely cleared out some cobwebs and the extra effort on the home page and performance has made a big difference. Kick the tires a bit and let us know what you think. You can also read the more detailed release notes, here, on the GroupSwim Pool.
Tags: Community, GroupSwim, moderation, Release
