Re: Managing communications | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com) | |
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2017 07:35:42 -0800 (PST) |
> What have other groups found that > works to better manage group communication or group documents? We started with Yahoo Groups and have many groups— teams, working groups, interest areas, etc. We had a website with documents etc. but still suffer from Yahoo stripping the attachments on all our email messages with no notice. Gone policy drafts and minutes not pasted into messages. At one point Yahoo limited searches to hundreds of messages when after 19 years we need to search thousands. (They may have changed that back). The website has now gone to Association Voice which is a service for traditional condos. There are constraints you have to fit into but it can organize information well and more people like it than like Wordpress. But we transferred with the belief that it would allow us to do everything in one place, but the calendar and email are too expensive and/or limited. We use CalendarWiz for many things — reserving rooms and parking spaces, admin reminders, etc. We have an ISP that hosts our email addresses. Association Voice doesn’t have good galleries so we are up in the air about what to do with photos which are now in a private Wordpress site. We use GoogleSites for Facilities information — maintenance, utility account numbers, vendors, etc. This is a wiki, actually, that was fabulous and easy UNTIL we found out that we have used 99% of the storage allotted. We can’t pay to increase the storage and cannot download the data to move to another wiki. It will be copy and paste to move it. NEW SERVICE: Groups.io I’m preparing a proposal to transfer our email and wiki to Groups.io. I don’t have time to write up all the advantages of this service but it is fabulous. Easy to use, no need to give them your phone number, clean interface, expandable to a low cost service, an independent company devoted to groups using email etc. Owned by an experienced programmer who loves email. No marketing. Their business model is to provide higher level services and unlimited storage to large businesses, etc. These costs are very low and allow groups to expand to more services or more storage. Please look at the site. It also has two lists to participate in the development of the service. One for the software development and one for group managers. There is a lot of help. They transferred a 12 year old, 3,000 member list seamlessly. It often has a 1,000 messages a month so you know that was a lot of messages. Email does not count toward storage space — only files and photos. Each list has a wiki, data base, photo albums, calendar. The email options are much more robust with options to unfollow certain subjects, #hashtags, and more. The subscribers love it and just over a year, I’ve only had to help 3 people with their settings. That is a huge reduction. Groups can have subgroups so you can have a main list and subscribers to that list can then join the subgroups (teams, working groups, interest groups). That means one site for everything. Do look at this before you start up with anything else. I have more horror stories about Google. It looks great but down the road, things get complicated. I’m working on a proposal to move Takoma Village to this service but in the meantime, I am moving all my lists to Groups.io. Sharon ---- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC http://www.takomavillage.org
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Managing communications Fred-List manager, January 31 2017
- Re: Managing communications Dick Margulis, January 31 2017
- Re: Managing communications Sharon Villines, January 31 2017
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