Client Showcase: The Chronicle of Higher Education

GroveSite is pleased to welcome The Chronicle of Higher Education as a new client to its 'wiki' hosted collaboration service.  The Chronicle, a very prestigious organization, is the primary source of job listings for college and university faculty members and administrators in North America.

The Chronicle's Director of Sales Operations and Production was looking for an easy, collaborative solution for coordinating The Chronicle's advertising sales teams and sales support personnel.  With GroveSite she and her staff have quickly built a secure online Sales Resource Center, internally dubbed the "ChronWiki".   The Chronicle staff have embraced one of GroveSite's powerful features -  the custom web database.  Using our Custom Database Editor, they have quickly built several custom databases in the ChronWiki to track sales opportunities and manage contract processing work flow within their team.

Our staff at GroveSite is proud to support them and thrilled to see the customized collaboration solution they created with a minimal amount of web/phone training from us.

New Features: Database Quick Edit and Quick Discussion Post

GroveSite's online collaboration software now includes Quick Edit and Quick Discussion Post features to further enhance its shared database functionality.  In GroveSite, you can create a simple online database of whatever information is important to your team or project.  This might be Work Orders, Sales Leads, Software Bugs, Permit Status, Construction RFIs, Vendor Quotes, a Product Development Log, Audit Issues and so forth.

The new Quick Edit enables you to edit multiple rows simultaneously;  once you have made your changes, just click Save once.  It's fast and easy.

As our users know, a great thing about GroveSite's database feature is that you can have a 'discussion' area associated with each and every row in the database.   So if your database is for issue tracking, members of the team can add notes, interim status, resolution options, and so forth.  You can also attach files to your comments.   The Quick Discussion Post allows you to enter a comment once, and attach it to multiple rows of the database.

See graphics and examples at the GroveSite Help Desk

GroveSite selected for Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software, 2008

As a co-founder of GroveSite, I am pleased to say how honored we are that GroveSite was selected (for the second year in a row) for inclusion in the Gartner Magic Quadrant industry analyses, the "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software, 2008."   GroveSite was one of only 38 vendors, including giants such as IBM and Microsoft, selected for inclusion.   In its comprehensive study, Gartner evaluated each vendor's ability to execute and its completeness of vision.   In its comments about GroveSite, Gartner again mentioned GroveSite’s strength in “easily customizable workspaces that blend wiki-style text information with more structured file and data exchange" and its “innovative use of "online web-native databases."  

GroveSite's hosted collaboration software has been offered since 2003 in the 'team collaboration software' category.  We have chosen to offer only a hosted (software-as-a-service) version, as our niche is helping clients collaborate with their vendors, customers, and other external partners.  Gartner first developed a Magic Quadrant analysis of this market in 2007, at which time the title of their study was, "Gartner Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software." So it is interesting that in 2008, they have attempted to group vendors such as GroveSite -- whose emphasis is online team workspaces -- with vendors who offer  'Facebook'-style social software all under a Social Software moniker.

Back to the 'web-native database' feature mentioned in the study:  GroveSite’s clients are increasingly using this web database feature to support day-to-day workflow between a company and its overseas suppliers.  Our database feature is somewhat unique as it incorporates discussion logs, multiple file attachments with thumbnails, and granular security.  For these clients, GroveSite moves from ‘social community tool' to 'secure web system for vital day-to-day business operations’.  We love it!

McGrath joins GroveSite as CTO

Mr. Mike McGrath has joined GroveSite as Chief Technical Officer.  McGrath has over 17 years experience in the Information Technology industry with an emphasis on the development of complex business software.  Mr. McGrath comes from Countrywide Financial where he spent the last 3 years developing and supporting the Web Authentication System for the Countrywide Financial B2C / B2B websites. 

Mr. McGrath holds a M.S. in Computer Information Systems from Bellevue University and a B.S. in Finance from Peru State College.  In addition, he is a Microsoft .NET Certified Solution Developer.  "I'm very excited to join GroveSite, which is a proven leader in the Web Collaboration Software marketplace".

Saved by Software as a Service (Saas) Apps

If you, like me, are joined at the hip to your laptop, you know that sinking feeling when you realize your hard drive has died.  In times past, that meant days of unproductive time waiting for repairs, followed by frustration trying to get everything back to where it was before it broke.

But this time, my use of software-as-a-service applications saved me.  You see, 98% of my work is supported by hosted applications. I just grabbed a spare laptop in the office and kept on working, via the web.

CRM:  Our Customer Relationship Management application is built in our own GroveSite hosted collaboration software.  So I knew the status of each lead, what documents had been sent, what terms had been discussed and what I was supposed to do on each.  I interactively updated our CRM site with all the sales activities I did over that week.  Productivity loss:  0%

Customer Support:  When clients need assistance, my work with them is over the web, on their own GroveSites.  Our clients sites and data are all accessible by our support personnel, over the web.  Productivity loss:  0%

Finance and Accounting:  We use Quickbooks Online, the hosted service, for billing, accounting, and financial reporting.  So without missing a beat, we could still add new clients to the billing system, answer billing questions, issue new invoices, and produce the month's financial statements.  Productivity loss: 0%

Email:  Well, I had to find my password to access my webmail, but webmail worked great too.  And it was even easier to keep up with email since I now use a Blackberry.  Plus the Blackberry had my address book and calendar, so I didn't even miss Outlook.  Productivity loss:  0%

In all, my week without my personal laptop was testimonial to the fact that web-based applications provide business continuity during a local disaster.

Are you sold on software-as-a-service yet?

GroveSite Selected for Under the Radar Conference!

GroveSite was selected from hundreds of nominees to be one of only 32 presenting companies at the IBD Networks Under the Radar conference in Silicon Valley this past Wednesday, Nov 16 05.  It was an honor to be recognized as a growing, promising, high technology firm – worthy of the attention of venture capitalists (VCs) around the country.  Even though we aren’t actively looking for VC money at this time, it was a great opportunity so we accepted the invitation.

The presentation format was challenging – only 3 PowerPoint slides, only 5 minutes, and no product demos allowed.  But Joe McVicker, GroveSite’s dynamic and talented President, did a great job in front of a panel of VC judges and an audience of VCs and interested Silicon Valley writers, bloggers, and tech company executives.

It was very interesting – some presenting firms had innovative state-of-the-art technology, but no customers and no revenue.  At GroveSite, we have great, hosted, online collaboration technology that is ‘wiki-easy’ and very unobtrusive.  Our innovation is really in the USER EXPERIENCE – easy to try, easy to buy, easy and oh-so-empowering to use.  GroveSite makes its clients look good to their own clients.

It was a great experience all around!

Software Update 2005-08-27

GroveSite is excited to announce a new personal "My Home" page for our users.  The new home page, which replaces the "My Sites" page, includes a dashboard view of updated content, calendar events, active tasks, and the familiar "My Sites" list.  The home page is fully customizable so that users can choose to include any or all of the new summary views using simple checkboxes in their "My Info" page.  Users will also have the option to display the home page as a popup or in a frame on the left for easy access.

The following enhancements were also included in this release:

• Manage Page Security - advanced feature for Site Administrators who use participant level page security within their sites
• Copy Enrollment - advanced feature to assist Organization Administrators who are managing hundreds of users and/or sites

GroveSite Customer Support
Phone: 866.952.9880
Email: customerservice@grovesite.com

Enterprise Collaboration Software - Easy or Not?

It's amazing how difficult enterprise collaboration software can be to use. As an independent consultant, I work with many large companies, and have to be added to their extranets to transfer large files and manage documents. In the case of one client, it took three months just to get the IT department to pay attention to the need to add me.  Then it took another two weeks to get my password and user name to me. The password was machine-generated, and kept getting caught in my spam filter. Finally I found it in the junk mail, pulled it out, and uploaded a file.  The next morning, my internal contact told me she couldn't open it!

While we were waiting for the special, supposedly better, internal solution, we were using GroveSite.  And guess what? It took 30 minutes to set up, everyone could open everything, and everything worked. Why did we need to change? GroveSite's so much easier than enterprise software.

Francine Hardaway, Ph.D.

CEO, Stealthmode Partners

602.412.3315

www.stealthmode.com

http://blog.stealthmode.com

Software Update 2005-06-20 GroveSite 4.0

GroveSite is pleased to announce the release of GroveSite 4.0 which includes these exciting features:

Project Plans
Task list pages have been enhanced to vastly improve the project planning process.  Project plans now include the functionality to:

• Flag milestones and show them on Calendar pages
• Show dependencies
• Track percent complete
• Highlight late tasks
• Check project plan for errors
• Display project Gantt chart
• Import from/Export to excel
• Share ongoing task updates and relevant files through an associated discussion thread

Search
GroveSite 4.0 offers search functionality for all users.  Using the new 'Search' button on the top navigation bar,users will be able to search the content of that site or any site where they have access.

Other

• File libraries will now thumbnail the first page of pdf and eps files to make finding a relevant file even easier.
• Popup date picker for date entry fields

GroveSite Customer Support
Phone: 866.952.9880
Email: customerservice@grovesite.com

Do-It-Yourself Collaboration Applications

Our CTO, Joseph McVicker, has been invited to speak at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in New York, June 20-22, 2005.  McVicker will speak in a session called "Who Needs IT? Simple Lightweight Applications You Can Use on Your Own".  This session is targeted at business managers who may need a simple ad hoc solution either as a complement or in the absence of IT supported applications.

For more information, see the press release.