We are proud to announce the latest release of our software. The team worked very hard to bring this release to fruition. The result is a great combination of new features and underlying social collaboration technology.
Question and Answer
One exciting addition is the combination of a new content type (question and answer) with our new recommendation engine. Questions fit perfectly into our group and permissions model. They are different than discussions since the answer to a question is a definitive end to a conversation/issue/process versus a discussion that remains open-ended.
When a user asks a question, our recommendation engine trolls through previous questions and identifies similar ones in real time, eliminating the need to ask the question in the first place. The engine finds similar questions by analyzing a number of factors including tags (automatically applied of course), people, related content, and a host of other factors. If the user decides to ask the question (we keep a draft while the user looks at the recommended content), we’ve added workflow to manage open and answered questions, comments, and other elements unique to the process of asking and answering questions. The benefits of this new feature are exciting. We help users find information quickly if used internally, thus saving them time to do more important things than asking redundant questions and waiting for answers. In the community product, this allows our customers to help their customers find answers without resorting to making a phone call or filing a case. It also highlights the experts in the respective communities and leverages their knowledge effectively.
Navigation
We gathered customer feedback and made changes to site navigation. We created a simple “Home” button and changed content navigation by adding a persistent “Browse” menu. We also added a powerful “Manage” menu for site and group managers to more easily configure and update the site and groups. Also, we made changes to the home page making it cleaner. We removed the welcome message and tab-row, which better leverages the new drop-downs and provides more real estate for the feeds. We also clarified the feeds (sort options) to better explain them to the users and avoid confusion.
Files
We added a new “File grid” view in our file collaboration application. The files are displayed as icons and there is a pop-up to get more details if desired. This change allows us to add more files to the page which improves the browsing experiencing and is very familiar to most users.
Profile
We upgraded the user profile to better highlight the expertise and activity GroupSwim collects. Now, users can access the recent activity of other users and better understand their reputation. You can now see the other users that follow someone and more information on the ratings they receive.
Other
Finally, we made the usual improvements to performance, fixed bugs, and improved the file upload experience. We hope you enjoy the new software and look forward to hearing what you think. Thanks!
Tags: Community, collaboration, GroupSwim, Release, Software
