GroveSite

GroveSite is a privately held online collaboration software company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The company offers secure online workspaces, sometimes called hosted wikis, to small and medium-sized businesses, and to larger enterprises^[1] who need to collaborate securely outside the IT firewall. Their flagship product, GroveSite 5.0, includes document management, web project management, wiki web pages, and other collaboration features. In January 2011, the company released an online relational database product that is also targeted at business users.^[2]

GroveSite signed its first two large customers, BearingPoint and Target, within a year of its 2003 launch. Most of its clients are in Consumer Packaged Goods, Professional Services, or Government and Non-Profit industries. Notable are OfficeMax, Restoration Hardware, Abt Associates, AARP, ACGME and California’s BTH Agency.^[3] The company and its features are compared to that of other online collaboration, project management and web database solutions, including those from Central Desktop, Basecamp, Trackvia, and Quickbase. Unlike those companies, GroveSite does some customization of features for particular clients. This makes their product less scalable, but more attractive to those customers.^[4] GroveSite is positioned as an end-user-oriented, customer focused, SharePoint alternative.^[5][6]

History

Grove Technologies LLC, dba GroveSite, was founded in 2002 by three principles, President Thomas I. Selling PhD, CMO Jane Hagen, and CTO Joseph S. McVicker.^[7] Prior to founding GroveSite, Mr. McVicker and Dr. Selling were with Thunderbird, the Graduate School of International Management. McVicker designed the school’s collaborative professor-student software, a well-liked alternative to Blackboard. The first GroveSite collaborative workspace offering was launched in January 2003; this is notable for making it a relative pioneer in the software-as-a-service space. The company has been profitable since 2005. Since 2006, the company has been women-owned. In 2007 the company was included in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software; it was also included in the similar 2008 Magic Quadrant study.^[8]

Products

GroveSite 5.0 is offered in two plans: Intro and Pro.^[9] The Intro plan includes a single site and all the general collaboration features. The Pro plan includes multiple sites, enterprise site and user management, all general collaboration features and the custom online database offering.

GroveSite is a DabbleDB alternative and offers a data migration service to former DabbleDB customers.

Features

Secure Online Workspaces

• Site Creation and Management
• Customizable Branding and Navigation
• Security, SSL Option, Strong Passwords
• Member Enrollment and Management
• Enterprise management: Hierarchies, Usage Reporting, Archiving

General Collaboration and Communication Tools

• Document Management, Check Out/In
• Discussion Forums
• Wiki Web Pages^[10]
• WYSIWYG Editing
• Online Calendars
• Member Directories
• Email Notification, Email Digests
• Image Handling

Web Project Management

• Task Management
• Milestones
• Issue Tracking
• Reports, Gantt charts
• Dashboard
• Task, Calendar Email Alerts

Custom Online Databases

• Flat or Online Relational database
• Custom Database Editor
• Excel Import Wizard
• Custom Views, Filters, Comments
• Quick Edit
• Import/Export

See also

• List of relational database management systems
• List of project management software
• List of collaborative software
• Online office suite
• SaaS
• Collaboration software
• Project management software

References

External links

• GroveSite
• GroveSite Blog
• Help Desk