Whew! [tap tap tap] Can you hear me in the back? It's been far too long since we've updated this blog. The Zanby crew has just been too busy developing our platform and building some kickass, worldchanging online communities. It's time to come up for air, dust this thing off and share what we've been up to.

Watch this space in the coming days and weeks for updates on where we're at and what we've done over the past year and a half. We've got major upgrades to the Zanby Enterprise Group Family System to tell you about, new team members to introduce, and some wicked cool client projects to announce and case studies to share.

So stay tuned...

The new Zanby is live! at http://www.zanby.com

Thanks to all who participated in the sneak preview and gave us great feedback.

Your old accounts, groups, photos, and so on have all been migrated to the new Zanby. You can log in using your old username and password.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

As you can see from the post below, the next release of Zanby provides outstanding new tools for organizing your group. If you can't wait until the release goes out to everyone, send me an email at zee@zanby.com, and we'll get you a sneak peek password. Be sure to let me know if you are a current Zanby user.

Announcing the all new Zanby! We have a new look and tons of new features. We even have a new mascot named Zee:




When you first go to the new Zanby, check out the tour links on the home page, they will give you a quick overview of the features.




Account Details
Ok, so that’s the new look, what about the services what’s changed?

Zanby is now organized into three levels of service, Individual, Group and Group Families (Patent Pending). It is always free to create an individual account on Zanby.com and it is always free to start and manage as many basic groups as you want. Users can pay to upgrade group host accounts to include premium services if they wish. Group Families are a paid service.

FREE

• Individual Accounts
• Basic Group Host Account

PAID

• Premium Group Host Account
• Group Families (patent pending)
• Professional Group Families
• Organic Group Families

Each level comes with a set of functionality that operates within that level, and also across all of the other levels.


What’s New
The design team has paid careful attention to the needs of our users gathered over the last two years of development. Below are high-level summaries of the different kinds of Zanby services.

Individual Accounts
At the individual level users will enjoy a rich, social media experience similar to Facebook or My Space. Individuals can use a very wide array of features common to social media applications to communicate, connect and create. Zanby's drag and drop template editor allows individual members to create a custom profile and adjust the content and look and feel to their taste. It is also easy to make friends, upload photos and documents, create lists, manage personal events, and track participation in discussions. Individual members can join as many groups as they wish and start as many free groups as the wish. Individuals may distribute their content to any level of Zanby at anytime by simply sharing it with a group or group family or friend.









Free Group Host Accounts
At the basic group level (one group host and one set of individual members), members can take advantage of an unparalleled suite of free organizational tools to manage their group activities.




Group Hosts can display group content through a drag and drop template editor, appoint co-hosts, adjust privileges and membership rules, manage documents, photos and lists. Communication in groups and group families are always managed through Zanby Discussion Server® which enables groups to create and manage custom email lists.




Zanby Discussion Server is very similar in functionality to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, except that on Zanby users can segment group discussions into as many different discussions as they wish, the discussions can be moderated much like a regular message board, and they can be merged at a later date with other groups and group family discussions. The free group level also includes a very robust events management system.

Premium Group Host Account
A Premium Group Host Account is directed towards larger groups, groups with a higher level of administrative activity, groups that need to be conscious of their brand, or groups that want to expand into several groups but maintain their organizational structure. Premium Group Host accounts have four important additional features:

1. Premium Groups can adjust their look and feel of their home page with the Theme Editor.
2. Premium Groups can publish the group home page out to another website. This feature works much like Blogger. Groups adjust the look and feel and content of the Home Page, set the publication settings and publish.
3. Create and manage Committees with Zanby Committees. Create a sub-group of your group, set a range of visibility and administrative settings, assign members and chairs. Zanby creates a Discussion with a committee email account, a committee document folder and a committee roster to be used in creating committee events.
4. Premium Groups can join group families. That is, they can merge with other groups while maintaining their original structure, to form larger organizations.

A Premium Group Host Account costs $13.00/month and applies to the host, not just the group. One Premium Group Host Account affects all of the account-holder's groups. There is no limit to the number of members that can join a group.







Zanby Group Families (Patent Pending)
Zanby Group Families are what make Zanby so different from other social media applications. At it's most basic level, a group family is a group in which the members are other groups, not people. This idea gives chapter-based associations, international businesses, or just groups that want to join together to achieve common goals the ability to share content and activities with great ease.




Zanby Group Families are a paid service. There is a one-time start-up fee of $90.00 then a monthly maintenance fee that scales up or down depending on how many individuals are in the entire family.

When a group family is formed, all of the normal premium group tools are formed with it. However, all content from the member groups can be aggregated at the family level, from where it can be organized to suit the enterprise. This makes it incredibly easy to maintain an enterprise calendar, discussions, photos, lists, etc.




Additionally, the owners of a Zanby Group Family can create as many hierarchies of their groups as they need to represent the organization. For example, you might want to organize the family by Geography and you might want to organize your groups by function or brand or interest. That is completely possible with Zanby Hierarchy Designer.



Two kinds of group family – Organic and Professional
An Organic Group Family is owned by the member groups. Each group pays a monthly fee that is based on the total number of individual members in the family, then apportioned according to the number of individuals in the group.

A Professional Group Family is owned by one organization or individual. The owner of the family pays all monthly costs for the family. The owner of a professional group family may create groups within the family. Also, the owner of a professional group family can allow basic groups to join.

It has been quite a while since there has been publicly visible activity here at Zanby. We have been quietly investing the last 18 months in developing the next generation of enterprise social networking applications. Stay tuned -- we are just days away....

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Recently one of our groups asked for more information on how to take an xml feed and turn it into html for their site. What follows is a quick tutorial on what really happens when you "take an xml feed" onto your site, and how to get something running quickly.

Here is a simple process diagram that shows what is happening:




As you can see, the browser request gets to your server, where you need to run some kind of script. For sake of discussion, let us assume you can run Perl as a CGI script on your machine. (The process is the same regardless of if you are using bash, or if you are using PHP, or if you are using ASP.NET.)

This script has two assignments -- first, get the XML from Zanby. Second, transform it into something that you want to send back to the browser.

In Perl, the first part, getting the XML from Zanby, is easy -- there is a wonderful package called LWP::Simple that handles all of the issues of getting information from a remote web server.

The second part, transforming the XML into something to send to the browser, can be as easy or as complex as you want to make it. The easiest approach is to use XSLT to transform your XML into HTML.

So, our complete perl script is pretty simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# example of taking Zanby xml feed and wrapping it into html

# Note we are using the "XML::XSLT" package, which also requires 
# the XML::DOM, LWP::Simpla, and XML::Parser packages
#
# Assuming you have a relatively clean / modern / complete perl 
# installation, you can do "cpan XML::XSLT".

# This is not meant to be complete, good, or otherwise wholesome 
# clean-thinking code -- steal at your own risk :-)


use LWP::Simple;
use XML::XSLT;


# get the xml feed

my $xmlstring = get 'http://zanby.com/feed/rrr/groups/?sw=dfl&links&format=4';


# run the xml thru our xsl transform

my $xslfile = "zanby2dfl.xsl";
my $parser = XML::XSLT->new ($xslfile);
my $result = $parser->serve (Source => $xmlstring,
                                          xml_declaration => 0,
                                          http_headers => 0);

# set up appropriate http headers and return

my $length = length ($result);
print "Content-Type: text/html\nContent-Length: $length\n\n$result";

Now, for the XSLT that transforms the Zanby XML into something useful:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h2>DFL Links</h2>
    <table border="1">
    <tr bgcolor="#7f7fff">
      <th align="left">District</th>
      <th align="left">Link</th>
    </tr>
    <xsl:for-each select="groups/MN/group">
    <xsl:sort select="name"/>
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="name"/></td>
      <td><a>
        <xsl:attribute name="href">
          <xsl:value-of select="summary"/>
        </xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:value-of select="name"/> 
      </a></td>
    </tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Here is an example: the DFL Links XML feed turned into HTML using the code above.

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As Washington Whispers notes, America for Richardson has come to Zanby.

The Netroots for Richardson has their first national meeting day on February 6.

I can't wait to find out how it goes.

Richardson recently made some great progress in Darfur, negotiating a 60-day cease fire between warring parties. That's impressive progress in an intractable conflict. Diplomacy like that will be welcome indeed in the coming years.

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Zanby has a couple of large families of groups, now. From Cafe Press groups (website), to the DFL Links to America for Richardson groups (website), Zanby is supporting a really wide variety of interests and people.

Some of you have written and asked how you can structure a search query from zanby to direct users to a specific set of search results. Try this:

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=yourkeyword&yourkeyword

Where yourkeyword = your group's special tag or keyword. For example, the DFL Links uses

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=dfl&links

to direct users to the right set of search results.

The 32 Richardson Groups uses

http://zanby.com/groupsearch?search_words=richardson.

If you want to add more search words, you can just enter more & search words.

OR..you can access the XML feed:

The request looks like:

http://zanby.com/feed/rrr/groups/?sw=searchkeyword&format=4

Where "searchkeyword" is the tag / groupname / etc. that you want to search for. The result is a simple XML file that provides the name of the group, the host, next event info, the location of the group (city / state/ zipcode), the group description, how many members there are in the group, and a link to the group page.

The groups are sorted by region.

Here are some sample feeds:

Bill Richardson Groups

Cafe Press

Cafe Press

Happy organizing...

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