Using CubeTree Groups to Collaborate on Projects

Businesses today must accomplish their goals and deliver results faster and with fewer resources. As organizations respond to these demands they are turning toward globalization, off-shoring and outsourcing to reduce costs. To execute in this new environment, enterprises require better communication tools that enable collaboration and the ability to quickly and easily form project teams of the right people.

We understand this need, which is why we offer special Group functionality. There are three types of groups - public, private and cross-company - that can be created in CubeTree to support the different needs of project teams.

• Public groups are open to anyone in the organization, content, comments and feed items posted to the group are search-able and become a permanent resource. The openness of a public group is often beneficial for the simple reason that ideas and effort can be contributed from anywhere in the organization. You never know where innovation will come from and a system like CubeTree helps unlock hidden resources. (Example: a group of engineers, designers and project mangers who are working on the next release of a product.)

• Private groups require an invitation from a Group Administrator/Owner in order to receive access to the content. Data in a private group is only available to members of that group and is a great place to work on sensitive projects or on early drafts of information that is not ready to be made public. For example, preparing for and delivering financial data for board meetings; discussing performance plans with a manager; or creating engineering resource plans for an upcoming release.

• Cross-company groups allow you to include vendors, partners and customers from outside the company into a secure, private group where the members can be from within the company domain as well as external domains. These groups are similar to private groups where they require an invitation and only members have access to the Group content. Members from multiple domains can collaborate toward a single goal in a secure environment. An few examples of how these groups are used include companies that create a group for each of their external clients and post and collaborate on deliverables; HR and hiring managers working with an external recruiter to review and comment on candidates; two companies working together to complete acquisition due diligence tasks.
  

The hidden power of CubeTree Groups is their ease of use. It's easy for knowledge workers to create groups and invite members. All you need to connect to a new group is access to the internet.

Whatever the type of Group that is used, knowledge workers leverage all the CubeTree applications they need to support the objectives of the team. Groups have similar features to personal profiles in CubeTree: They have comment feeds, allow documents, photos and links to be shared, wiki's can be created and modified, and tasks can be assigned from within them. In addition, Groups add discussion forums, blogs, real-time chat rooms and polling. CubeTree Groups are flexible and adapt to the evolving needs of a project. When new people join, they can come up to speed on the project by reviewing the discussions, documents, links and all the information stored in the group for that project.

Getting work done in an organization is about completing projects on time with available resources that are aligned with organizational goals. For organizations with increasingly dispersed workforces CubeTree provides a fast, easy and secure place to come together in Groups and work on those projects. Its where organizations can get the right people together with the right tools to get work done.