Collaborating in Online Groups
Online groups are not new: they are sometimes called virtual
workspaces, online workspaces, virtual teams, forums, bulletin
boards, online communities of practice, email groups, email
lists, mailing lists, list servers or listservs.
With OnlineGroups.Net, all your
online groups
are on your own site.
OnlineGroups.Net makes it easy for you to
start and run an online groups site,
whether it is for ten or ten thousand people.
We provide hosted access to online groups
sites that you can customise and manage yourself.
We can help you to enhance or
integrate your site and
to design, launch your site and support
participation so your project is successful.
OnlineGroups.Net runs on the open source collaboration
technology GroupServer.
Why Email Groups?
Email has won. It is the primary medium used for online communication.
Email is fantastic for one-to-one communication and even better
for one-to-many. Many-to-many communication via email, however, quickly
gets messy and unmanageable. Reply-to-all works well for small groups for a short
time but the emails tend to get longer and longer with the text of previous
messages and to drift further and further from the meaning expressed by the subject line.
The list of recipients tends to become variable. People complain about getting copied in.
Each participant has their own (possibly different) copy of the messages and there is
no authoritative central record of the conversation. There are no clear rules about
who is in and who is not or what is ok in the group or what the purpose is.
For group communication beyond ad hoc collaboration, email is very difficult to manage.
Email Groups Make Email Useful for Many-to-Many Messaging
Email groups, like OnlineGroups.Net online groups enable groups
to hold ongoing conversations using regular email. Because each
email has a subject line tag and a well-written subject line,
you can clearly identify what is likely to be inside that email
and decide between reading it, marking it as "read" without reading it
or deleting it. You know you can easily find that email again in the Web archives,
at any time in the future. If you are actively following an online conversation,
the "topics" interface in the Web interface makes it easy to follow
just the topic or topics you are interested in, whilst ignoring the others.
Doesn't this just generate more Email?
If there is not enough communication occurring in a group,
then more email may be just what is required, as long as it
it used efficiently. If email is already being used, inefficiently
in attempts at group communication, then migrating that email into
an online group will create no new email, it will just make the
email more efficient and more effective.
What People Do in OnlineGroups.Net?
In OnlineGroups.Net, people
-
Hold multiple concurrent conversations,
-
Share files, and
-
Participate using email, the Web or both!
When using OnlineGroups.Net, users can easily see who is in
the group and have as much privacy or visibly as makes
sense.
You are in Control
OnlineGroups.Net puts you in control, whether you are a
participant in an online group or an OnlineGroups.Net site
administrator.
Participants
Participants like OnlineGroups.Net because
our online groups
- Are easy and fast to use,
- Have no ads,
- Have flexible delivery options,
- Make it easy to follow topics when there are a lot
of posts, amd
- Make it easy to share files.
Site Administrators
Site administrators like
OnlineGroups.Net because