Welcome to Ryver!
The best way to communicate with your team.
What is Ryver?
Ryver is a new, more powerful way to communicate with your team(s). The employees at Ryver have been using group chat tools such as Campfire and HipChat for years. More recently, Slack has made a big splash in this space. We love the way chat products help us stay connected when we’re physically apart, and how they allow us to quickly communicate and make decisions even when we’re in the same office. However, we felt like there were some improvements that could be made to take Chat (and our productivity) to the next level. Now we use Ryver, and we don’t miss those chat-only products at all…
Chat, Posts and Files
Ryver combines the freedom and immediacy of chat with the organization and power of posts and comments. You can also share files and Ryver will keep them organized within the context of the team, project, topic, etc. in which they are shared.
Chat is great for communicating “right now” and getting things done. We use it all the time. But chat is also transient in nature, and group chat can become “noisy”, sometimes making it difficult to find the information you need. Sure, you can search, but you have to know what you are searching for!
Enter Posts…
Posts in Ryver are a lot like posts in Facebook. Each post is a topic of discussion, with support for attachments, and threaded conversation via comments. In Ryver, it is easy to add simple formatting like bold and bullet points to make your post more readable. In a team setting, posts tend to bring out more thoughtful and focused communication than chat. We at Ryver have found ourselves continuing to use chat to do 75% or more of our 1:1 communication, but interestingly, have found the opposite to be true when communicating with a group of people, where we create posts 75% of the time!
Find out more about the power of posts.
Users, Forums and Teams
- Users: Users are all of the people invited into your Ryver account. You can access other Ryver users from the main navigation bar to initiate one-to-one (1:1) communication. As a user in Ryver, you have your own private chat, posts and files with other users! There are two types of users:
- Members can see all other members in the Users list, as well as any guests they share a team with. Members can also create their own teams and forums.
- Guests can only see users (member or guest) they share a team with, and they cannot create teams or forums.
- Forums: Forums are a place for topic-based group communication between all members in your Ryver account (plus any invited guests). Forums support posts, chat and sharing files. Posts should feel very familiar to users of Facebook or traditional forum software, who are used to having threaded discussions. The POSTS tab is kind of like a Facebook wall for your forum. Additionally, every forum has a chat room for more free form, dynamic discussion.
- Teams: When privacy is important, users can be grouped into teams. As with users and forums, each team has chat, posts and files. Teams are just like forums, except they are Invite Only. If a member or guest is not invited to be a teammate on a team, they cannot even see that the team exists.