GroupSwim: text analysis meets collaboration

This blog post led us to GroupSwim, a company we met with the other day. I found GroupSwim to be a particularly interesting example of the value text analysis can lend to content management, something Nick wrote about the other day.

GroupSwim isn’t selling content management software in the classic sense. It’s SaaS offering is for collaboration, either for internal teams or externally-facing communities. It actually reminds me most of Koral, which Salesforce.com acquired a year ago and has since become Salesforce Content.

There’s a bit more meat to what GroupSwim offers though as it uses natural language processing to recommend tags, auto tag content added to this system and recommend related content. We spoke to an early GroupSwim customer yesterday who just raved about the system’s ability to auto-categorize emails and other docs, making it easier to get content into the system in an organized way and to find content on particular topic or customer account (this customer is using the service as a collab tool for sales and marketing).

Applying this sort of text analysis in a group collaboration / social software tool isn’t something I’ve heard much about lately. It will be this sort of thing that will differentiate vendors from the increasingly large pack moving forward. GroupSwim is still tiny and with its service not generally available until this past December, it’s perhaps a little late to this party. It will need to ramp up its own sales and marketing efforts significantly — 451 group clients can expect a full write up on GroupSwim in the coming days.