I am considering setting up a discussion group for a work-related area of interest. I've never been involved with owning or moderating a group before, so I'm starting at square one. I don't have a strong technical background, so it needs to be easy to manage -- or at least have well-documented and easy-to-follow instructions. For those of you who are or have been group owners or moderators, do you have an opinion as to which hosting service to use? After starting to browse Yahoo's group how-to pages, it seems pretty straightforward, but I'd like to hear the experiences of others before committing to one. I'll also be e-mailing owners of some of the groups I belong to, but meanwhile I wanted to tap the huge brain trust among this community. Many thanks in advance!
When I have done it before, I ran it as BBS software on a web server, much like PC. That may be overkill for your application, but maybe not. If you already have a server online running SQL or MySQL, then it's pretty easy to set up the code. Tom
I'm a member of several Yahoo groups, and I've owned/moderated a few, too. Yahoo is pretty easy to set up; you can set your group to "private" so no one will happen upon it and try to join. You can make it as simple or as complex as you like. I find the dashboard to be pretty easy to use. I've belonged to one Google group, and I was not impressed. It seemed rather limited in function.
If it's for work, you probably want to run it on resources that you genuinely control and keep it private. Sure, hundreds of sensitive corporate secrets are send through AOL and other IM servers every day, but you don't have to follow that example! . As far as what software to run, not sure, I never set up a forum system but there must be a whole bunch of options available by now. I hear good things about Drupal as a "knowledge management" system, for example. . _H*
Thanks to all for the responses. Rae, the responses I've gotten so far from group owners (including the Yahoo Prius-2G group owner) pretty much echo what you've said. Tom, the mere mention of the word "code" is enough to send me running. The BBS concept probably is a little overkill, and more than I'm willing to try to manage. This has to be simple. I don't have my own server anyway. Hobbit, interestingly enough, the group will be for discussions of how to keep certain private information private. Among my duties is to manage my organization's HIPAA privacy compliance. (HIPAA is the federal law that governs privacy and security of medical information.) This group would be for my counterparts in other EMS agencies across the country to discuss HIPAA-related issues. So I feel pretty confident that group members, presumably with similar duties and interests, would know better than most the importance of protecting confidentiality -- certainly of medical records, and probably of any other information as well.
If it's just going to be a simple mailing list, Yahoo! Groups is probably the simplest to set up and run. If it's going to be a more complex thing like a Bulletin Board, you're going to have to deal with words like "Code".
Take a close look at Google if you want collaboration. With Google docs you can share and edit spreadsheets and text between members. You can also set up group calendars so people can see dates and deadlines.
Eep, if you're dealing with stuff at that level then you absolutely want to keep it strictly in-house and inside encrypted sleeves when people are interacting with it. There's *far* too much data-loss going on these days to consider anything less. Don't become the next TJX! . _H*
