Why ISGsites?

Associations can benefit from ISGsites wherever you have defined groups, such as committees, councils, volunteers, advocacy organizers, project teams, chapters, boards and special interest groups, whose work involves multiple sources of input and a need for ongoing access to shared materials.

The opportunity: Make it easier for association groups to work together
Associations derive a great deal of value from the activities of their many types of workgroups, but it can be challenging for those groups to work together when the team members are geographically dispersed.

These groups share information by a variety of means, including e-mail messages, distribution of documents to the group as e-mail attachments, phone calls, periodic face-to-face meetings, mail, and internal filing systems. But they need to eliminate the following problems:

• Un-searchable resources – Without shared libraries, there is no one place where team members can go to find the definitive version of relevant materials. Team members may be storing resources in their own filing system, offline or on internal networks, and in inconsistent ways – all of which prevents the team from searching for content as needed.

• Confusion from multiple sources of edits - It generally takes considerable manual effort to consolidate edits from multiple team members into a version that all can review, especially when new edits are made to obsolete versions of the document and team members are unaware of contributions by the others.

• Scattered communications – Because e-mail is distributed outward to team members, it ceases to be manageable as part of a centralized system – not attached to a particular event or topic or context. Even setting up an online discussion board does not in itself provide the context, priorities and relationships needed for goal-oriented communications.

• Information overload – Too much communication about the wrong things is just as problematic as too little communication about important things. When communications are not organized and filtered for relevance, members expend wasted effort wading through, and trying to tune out, the static.

While it is up to the group members themselves to coordinate their activities and produce results, your association can add value by acting as a facilitator, providing a more nurturing environment for the suggestions, decisions, submissions, feedback and conversations that have to happen for the group to be successful.

ISGsites gives you the ability to address these issues by offering tools that groups can use to support each of their different types of communication.

With ISGsites, it is easy to set up navigable, organized, multi-faceted, and private websites, each dedicated to the communication needs of a particular workgroup. These private websites are highly effective in organizing, enabling and targeting communications, so that group members can find and post timely and relevant information that relates to the group's activities.

Take advantage of the capabilities in SharePoint 2010
Building ISGsites on top of SharePoint 2010 lets you take advantage of the extensive capabilities Microsoft has built into SharePoint, which include:

• Site creation templates
• Group-based security
• Document libraries
• Forms libraries
• Dashboards
• MySites profile pages
• Related links
• RSS to aggregate postings from multiple sources
• Group calendars
• Meeting workspaces
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Search documents
• Surveys
• Discussion forums
• Document versioning
• Content management
• And much, much more...

Keep member and event information up-to-date automatically
By then integrating those capabilities with the huge amount of information you have about your members and events in iMIS, you can build intelligence into the workspaces:

• Member data is drawn directly from iMIS – and kept up-to-date – so the workspaces are filled with accurate and current information.
• Permissions are granted automatically based on member status in iMIS, so your staff doesn’t have to deal with the logistics of assigning each person to the correct workspaces and giving them the level of permissions they need to access files and manage workflow.
• Calendars, rosters and other resources in the workspaces are populated by information specific to the group and relevant for the group, making them even more useful.

Cost-effective, easy to get started
By delivering ISGsites in the cloud, you can avoid the investment you would normally have to make in software and infrastructure, and you can reduce your IT management issues. ISGsites runs over the Internet, with SharePoint 2010 and the ISGsites software running on our servers. We do all the maintenance, we provide technical support, and we keep your system updated.

Use ISGsites to provide a powerful web-based information sharing platform and toolkit with the many features your organized groups need in order to work efficiently together via the Internet.

Learn more:
Why Software as a Service (SaaS) is better