One question I get all the time is can we organize groups in nested folders. We are all so accustomed to this way of thinking about organization, we assume it is the right way to do it. For example, I want to create my Sales group and have East and West under it , and so on. Or, someone uses GroupSwim for a project and wants all technical groups under one umbrella. We can all relate to this habit. The problem is it doesn’t make sense. The minute you build a hierarchy for an organization or project, it becomes out-of-date or simply wrong. There is a better way!
From the beginning, we designed GroupSwim to define relationships between groups through tags, not hierarchy. The tags determine how groups are related. In the previous example, I could create three groups; Sales, West, and East; each one has the “sales” tag applied to them. I can also tag the marketing group that works with sales. In this scenario, when I search for “sales”, I get all four groups. The benefits are legion:
- Tags are dynamic, just like business and life
- You can have as many as you want
- You can change them at any time
By using tags as an organizational metaphor, we allow our collaboration sites and customer communities the opportunity to evolve over time.
The other important factor here is search; it is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter where you put stuff if you have a good search engine, which we do. It also allows the ultimate freedom to organize because in the end, you can find what you need quickly regardless of where it is.
Frankly, the biggest barrier and con to this approach is habit. People are simply so used to seeing nested folders, that it seems odd to them when they don’t see them. While we aren’t the only technology using tags versus folders, we are going to stick to our guns on this one. It does force to do some “evangelism” on this topic, but we can take it. What do you think? Miss those nested folders?
