Organic Groups... as a Business Tool?
Initially, Drupal's Organic Groups (OG) allowed users to create (and self-govern) areas where like-minded community members could discuss topics of interest. As the use of OG grew, it's started solving all manner of challenges for web developers and their business clients. The majority of our clients, for example, like to use OG to separate parts of their community into "neighborhoods" where products can be showcased, customers can mingle, and partners, developers, or sales teams can collaborate.
Let Me Explain
Businesses, big and small, have to walk a fine line on today's web. They have a variety of audiences to communicate with and unlimited streams of product information to distribute. The task they're faced with is organizing all this information and speaking to all these audiences in a clear, organized (and efficient) way.
That's difficult on a static site.
You usually end up with 1) a page on your web site for each product, and 2) time logged at trade shows and other events connecting with developers, partners, buyers, and end users.
A Better Way
An interactive environment where products cross-sell and up-sell each other and users communicate with the company (and each other) is becoming the ideal.
Drupal and OG give you the power to set up areas or "groups" on your site for as many products or audiences as you like. By keeping all of your products and interaction with your audiences under the same roof, you increase the ability to communicate with a single voice while allowing various constituencies the freedom to interact and evolve as necessary.
OG for Business
Here's a list that is short and to the point but goes a long way in explaining what role Organic Groups can play in a business community.
Remember that like most dynamic community sites, your front page displays a river of *all* (public) information and is constantly updating.
Here's where OG comes in to play:
- Each group page displays a river of "group-specific" information that may or may not show up on the front page. So if you have a new product release, it can show up on the front page and on the product-specific group page.
- RSS feeds are as plentiful as there are pages on your site. Users can subscribe to the main feed to get ALL the news or they can subscribe to a product or audience feed to get a specialized slice of the news.
- Group pages can be public or private. Group membership is required to access private areas or to read private posts. You can use private groups to give partners or vendors their own area to interact on your site. This WebWise site, for example, has an "employees" area where we post benefits information, how-to documents, and project schedules.
- Group membership is required to post stories to any group page, public or private.
- Group areas can (within reason) be themed independently of the site.
- Content can be targeted for any number or combination of groups. (Very nice feature for cross-selling and up-selling.) If an article points out the advantages of products A and B, it can be tagged to show up in both product A's area and product B's area (and even the developer area where product A and B wire-heads hang out).
- A group area is not an independent web site. If your goal is to have an area of the site with more features, brighter colors, and different navigation than the rest of the site, you might be best served by creating your own independent web site.
- It's difficult to totally isolate a group. (And why would you want to?) For example, the blocks you see in the left and right columns of the WebWise site, are likely to be on each of the site's group pages.
- Users can join public groups but must be added (or invited) to Private groups by the group manager.
- Group members can opt to receive e-mail notifications when group content is added to or commented on.
- Group managers can also send e-mail messages to the entire group membership.
Buyer Beware
There is one feature that we have to comment out of the standard OG code for all of our corporate clients: e-mail notifications. Unfortunately, even when content is being moderated, the standard OG package sends notification e-mails to group members as soon as a node or comment is submitted -- before any moderation takes place. Needless to say, corporations frown on systems that forward V!agra e-mails to their installed base.
18 Oct 2007: The current release of Organic Groups (5.x-4.0) fixes the above mentioned problem (sort of). This release no longer sends e-mail notifications about unapproved content. Unfortunately, it doesn't send notifications at all if you have moderation turned on. If you don't use moderation, notifications go out as advertised.
21 Oct 2007: I did a little more experimenting with the newest version of OG and noticed an enhancement that allows you to use the job_queue module to send e-mail notifications at cron time. This is a nice enhancement because it allows you to batch e-mail notifications so your server isn't constantly being slowed down by individual requests to send notification e-mails. Unfortunately, it still doesn't check to see if a node or comment is approved before a notification is sent.
A Working Sample
To see how this all comes together, here's how Symantec uses Organic groups to carve out an area of their community where they can feature a specific technology -- Application Virtualization & Streaming.
Notice how all the information in the center column is specific to the featured product. The left and right columns include a mix of product-specific information and other, more general information that helps the reader see beyond the confines of this specific "group".
Global Group Settings
When you add group functionality to your site, there are certain configuration options that apply to every group on the site. It's helpful to understand what these global settings are so you know what flexibility you do (or don't) have when setting up new groups.
Specific Group Settings
There are a number of configuration options that can be set on a group-by-group basis. This screen capture shows the configuration options available to individual groups.
If you have other examples of how you or your company is using Organic Groups, feel free to post a comment and show us your stuff.
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