Summary

Background

One of the biggest issues in a growing company is communication among all levels of staff. The lower and more autonomous an employee is, the less direct communication they receive from other members of the company. Email has traditionally taken the place of direct communication in these cases, but falls short in many ways. Alone, email does not lend itself to mass directed status updates, multi-user collaboration, or specific information gathering. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized interpersonal communication, but the inability to separate personal data from workplace data results in them not being appropriate on the job.

Bulletin hopes to remedy this by providing a new platform for group communication. Influences are drawn from both social networks and email, as well as direct forms of communication. Like a physical bulletin board in a home or office, Bulletin allows users to post public messages and provide information to friends or teammates in the form of status updates. Status updates are quicker to write and easier to understand than emails, so in many cases will be preferred. The service is split up into private groups. Users can create groups for a specific purpose and post to it. Only other members of that group will see the posts. The point of this is to separate and organize feeds to show only information that is important at that time. Privacy and keeping information related to the topic of choice will allow Bulletin to fit right in in an office environment or any kind of project.

Audience

Bulletin is aimed at any group or company that hopes to communicate more easily within the group and keep everyone informed about the status of the company or project. The service works best in small environments (3-50 people) but because of the customizability of groups, may be able to scale to even the largest companies or organizations.

Features of Bulletin

Bulletin relies on simplicity to allow any business or group to have quick team communication. After logging in, the user has a few options.

Create a group Users can create a private group for posting status updates. No one else will be able to see the posts until they are invited.

Invite users The person who created the group can invite other users to contribute to the group.

Posts and comments In addition to normal status updates, users can make comments on each other's posts. These are updated live for everyone as soon as a user makes a post or comment.

Inbox Any activity in groups that the user belongs to will appear in their Inbox. Post and comment notifications will allow the user to get an overview of any activity that has been going on in the groups they belong to. In future releases, the Inbox will contain group invites and other actionable items to help users get work done easily.