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Groupee, Inc., formerly known as Infopop Corporation (and before that, Madrona Park), is an internet software firm based in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1996, it moved to Seattle in 1999. Groupee was named one of the 35 "Best Places to Work" in Washington State by Seattle Magazine. It is privately held.

Products

Current Products

  • Groupee Community (formerly eve) - A hosted Java/MySQL based community system that includes four modules:
    • Forum - A Java-based internet forum system first released in 2002 as a descendant of OpenTopic but used a MySQL database instead of Oracle. UBB.x became part of Groupee Community in January 2004. The forum module has not been significantly updated since the creation of groupee community, remaining with the final ubb.x version numbering. It remains extremely stable due to this.
    • Chat - A live chat room system that was launched with Groupee Community in January 2004. Numerous updates were made
    • Premium Memership - A payment system to allow premium memberships to an online community.
    • Private Web Directories - A system secure the contents/files on your website. Grant access to any users or groups via the Groupee Community member management system.

Past Products

  • OpenTopic - A hosted Java/Oracle based internet forum system launched in 2000. The last version (3.1.0) was released in March 2004. OpenTopic has been replaced by Groupee Community.
  • buzzcast - An HTML e-mail campaign creator/list management service, launched in February 2002 and discontinued in August 2003.

Future Products

Ubb.classic/Ubb.threads replacement
In 2004 Groupee announced a new PHP/MySQL based internet forum system that would replace UBB.classic and UBB.threads.

On 30 March, 2006, Groupee announced that the new product, originally designed to replace UBB.classic and UBB.threads, wound up using much more of the core design of UBB.threads.

The new product will be named UBB.threads Version 7 and will be released as an alpha on May 10, 2006, with the release of a public beta version expected on June 15, 2006. June 15th is also the same date Groupee has set as the end of life date for UBB.Classic.

Groupee Community
A future product currently known as Groupee Community 2.0 was announced in January 2005. As of April 2006 very little updated information about this product has been unavailable since late 2005 and the product is admitted to be in development flux.

The first announced beta period came and went in October 2005. Since then any release date has been unavailable.

The new product is not going to be completely compatible with the existing version of Groupee Community, known as 1.2 after the version numbering. It is considered as a separate product. However, existing customers will be able to choose to upgrade or not.

Future Development
Groupee is extremely tight lipped as to upcoming features. When feature suggestions are made a common response is something similar to "your feature suggestion has been added for future consideration."

Many features common to other bulletin board systems have been unadded in years in the Groupee Community lineage originating with OpenTopic in 2000. This includes such basics as a large amount of poll options, the ability to skip ahead to the first unread post and next/previous links for page navigation.

The module system of Groupee Community was created with the announcment that many modules would be made available. Since the software release the number of modules increased from 2 to 4 and no outside modules have been announced by Groupee or integrated with the software.

History

Groupee, Inc. was originally known as Madrona Park, an internet software firm, founded in 1996. Its first software internet programs included the widely popular UBB Message board (now known as UBB.classic (Perl powered) and UBB.threads (PHP Powered)). Madrona Park became Infopop in 1999, while moving it's headquarters to Seattle, where most other software and internet had relocated to, including Microsoft. In the year 2005, the firm became known under its current name, Groupee, Inc.

Management Team

  • Ted O'Neill - CEO & Chief Groupee
  • Rosemary O'Neill - President & Chief Fashionista
  • Lori Hope, CPA - COO & Chief Conductor
  • Barry Kaplan - CTO & Chief Craftsman

External links

Companies based in Seattle, Washington | Software companies

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Groupee, Inc.".

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