Wednesday, March 17, 2010

New Feature: Group Management

Most of the time when you ask a question in Inkling, you want everyone possible who has some perspective to answer. But sometimes because of the sensitivity of a question or because of the danger of excessive "noise," you only want that question to be sent and viewed by certain people: a single department, or people at a certain level in your organization, for example.

For a long time Inkling has had the concept of private questions - the ability to define an invite list to expose the question to a subset of people. The problem was you couldn't save that list and use it over again. So we recently introduced the concept of groups. Here's how it works:

When you log in to an Inkling marketplace, you'll see a new link called "manage groups"



If you click that link, then click to make a new group, you'll see this:



You can search for people to be included or enter a bunch of email addresses. You can give your group a name, a description, and even start assigning questions to your group. Once you assign questions to a group, they will only be available to this group.

You can also assign questions to a group (only ones you wrote if you're not an adminsitrator) as you're proceeding through our question wizard. Once you get to the privacy tab, just click to limit access, then choose the groups you want to limit access to.



Right now group functionality is limited to access to questions, but we're thinking more about how we might have public groups too with more capabilities, so for example you could have an NCAA Tournament group where there is a separate discussion area, a list of questions related to the tournament, etc.

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