GroupServer has been developed due to a need which became evident when Randow, who was then operating GroupSense, was servicing a post-graduate business school, Advanced Business Education back in 1998. ABE's program inolved self-study and collaboration between small groups in between a series of block courses.

At that stage, Randow provided online collaboration consulting using platforms that were already available. "There were several mature web forum tools, although none of them supported email participation very well. I favoured email lists as they enabled participants to use the client they were already using for collaboration. The best list servers also had online archives, that supported posting and file-sharing: the best of both worlds. I’d been recommending a service called MakeList.com, until it became eGroups," he wrote in a company blog.

ABE then began using online groups for students using eGroups which was acquired by Yahoo! in the year 2000. By then ABE was providing nearly 200 groups, in each of two semesters, for small group collaboration. "In another small step, the web interface was de-emphasised in favour of simply getting the students to use the email interface. The usage and feedback were good, so we offered Yahoo! Groups in 2001 and 2002, by now teaching the students how to get a Yahoo! ID and use the web interface of their online groups. We also provided a website for ABEL, with static content, feedback surveys, some assessment results and links to the students’ Yahoo! Groups," Randow wrote.

But then problems began to emerge. Yahoo! Groups had been integrated with various other properties and the registration system became complicated. "It was difficult to point students to their Yahoo! Groups, because they all had different urls. The groups were located amongst arbitrary other Yahoo! Groups, as well as advertising that was often not appropriate for a business school. ABEL wanted their e-learning initiative to provide more of a sense of place, and to reflect their brand. Finally, administration of 330 Yahoo! Groups was manual and tedious, and there was a risk that losing access to the single administration account would shut down the whole show," he wrote.

ABE then asked Randow to find an e-learning platform that could provide the functionality offered by Yahoo! Groups and enmesh it within a website over which they had control. "We evaluated various elearning platforms, but they were all oriented towards content and had basic web forums, at best. There were still no list servers with a good web interface. What we did find was some open source components that went most of the way to what ABEL wanted. We also found some developers who could integrate the components quickly. ABEL agreed to the open source development approach, and GroupServer was developed and in production within a couple of months," Randow wrote.

In 2004, E-Democracy.Org's Steven Clift noticed GroupServer. Clift was also looking for an alternative to Yahoo! Groups and provided some resources so that GroupServer could have features which would make it more useful for public sites.

"The approach of incrementally developing GroupServer has worked well for OnlineGroups.Net and our customers. We have managed to keep budgets and timeframes in check. It has taken five years, but GroupServer is now scalable to hundreds of thousands of users, and it has been in production all this time," Randow says.

"By 2006, organisations including Landcare Research, Local Government Online, and Democracies Online were using GroupServer. Other organisations began to ask for online groups sites, so the OnlineGroups.Net beta service was launched. Now that OnlineGroups.Net is now out of beta, and GroupServer 1.0 is available to download, there is a viable alternative to Yahoo! Groups, and Google Groups, for organisations that want email groups with a web forum interface, on a dedicated customizable website, with no advertising."

Randow said future development would focus on support for multi-lingual site content and interfaces; expansion of the implementation of the WYMEditor structured content editor to support tasks commonly carried out using both wikis, and mid-range content management systems, expansion of user action logging, to facilitate system administration and improve data integrity and expansion and publication of an API to support modular enhancement, functional interaction with other systems, and data portability.

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Open Source  Sam Varghese