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Group Commons FAQ
Can Group Commons support my 3,000 member organization?
GC support an unlimited number of member organizations. You are the "umbrella" for
clubs, churches, fraternal organizations, professional associations. Can Group Commons help me organize my 32,000 customers?
Absolutely. Each customer is a part of your group. They all participate in directions,
projects, and tasks "the group" decides to endorse. My organization is so large, I can't imagine getting all 175,000 people to do anything
together. Can I break them up into smaller groups?
GC uses a number of tools to divide and subdivide large groups into working groups --
similar to "counting off" in high school gym! Projects, mailing lists, and specialized tasking
techniques facilitate special interest groups of any size. In our group, words such as "requirements" and "tickets" sound cold and harsh. We prefer
words such as "goals", "needs", and "offers". Should we find an alternative to Group
Commons?
All key words used in Group Commons are configurable -- have it your way. What's in a
word anyway? We really like the functionality in Group Commons, but we have our own branding that we've
cultivated over the years. What about our logo? Our colors? Our look and feel?
Logos, colors, look and feel are fully configurable, using style sheets, custom logos, virtual
private domains, and turn-on/turn-off features. I am responsible for 43,831 members in my membership organization. I spend about 30%
of my time logging in and logging out of our member organizations as I visit them to assist
with maintenance. Can Group Commons help that in any way?
GC is proud to announce the "single login" to all organizations affiliated with your umbrella.
Our greatest collaboration tool is our newsletter. Does Group Commons assist with
production and distribution of newsletters. And can we cut down on the inordinate amounts
of time managing mailing lists, bounces, anti-spam filters, etc.
GC sports a very useful newsletter composer --
http://www.groupcommons.com/base/gc/standard/newsletter/admin How about methods of tracking "volunteer" contributions of time and goods? We don't like
the concept of "volunteer", but we haven't found a method to track and reward people for
what they do for our organization. Last week we counted 14 places in our company where an individual's email address
appears, and must be maintained. It's gotten to where we HATE receiving a change of
address, or a piece of bounced mail.
GC maintains each individual's email address in one place and only one place. We recently decided to break our large group into study groups of 15 people each, but
realized very quickly that servicing the study groups using an Excel spreadsheet for each
was going to be a nightmare.
GC supports an unlimited number of Projects -- each with its membership, mailing list,
newsletter, and other forms of communication. Wikipedia has won our hearts! A very large proportion of our group really uses it. However,
when we wanted to send out notices of membership renewal, we were stymied.
GC supports wiki development and integrates it seamlessly with functionality that requires
specialized programming, decision trees, and conditional processes. Software tools. Is Group Commons compatible with and does it support the open source
project management software, gForge? Our company likes the idea of "agile programming"? Problem is, some of the approaches
to our problems seem to go along very well for a while and then they blow up.
Programmers leave and we practically have to start over.
GC members are all entitled to request functionality as they need it. All members benefit
from the "common repository". In many cases, others may well put in your request even
before you become aware of your need.
When I add a user, I have a choice of sending them a welcome letter. Where can I find that so I can
edit it?
1. Go to the Admin Dashboard/Welcome Letters
2. Copy the existing letter into your editor of choice.
3. Study the way merge variables work.
4. Create a new letter and paste in your own letter.
5. Give it a name and mark it as the default letter.
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