QuickTopic fills the gap

QuickTopic fills the major gap in collaboration tools between plain old email and more complex, long-term solutions like multi-threaded web bulletin boards or mailing lists.

Email is cumbersome for group discussions. A conversation is scattered among in-boxes, and there's no central place where it's captured.
Heavyweight collaboration systems require complex setup and registration and learning by participants.

QuickTopic fills the gap by providing a super-easy single-topic web forum that's also fully email-enabled. You can start a topic in ten seconds, and participants can use just email to participate, or they can use the web board, or both as the need arises.

• It's an easy web forum that works seamlessly with email.
• It's an instant mailing list with a web-based archive.

Instant collaboration

QuickTopic is about instant collaboration. It's frictionless. Have you ever tried a new way to collaborate with a group, only to have it falter because even one participant didn't want to learn how to use it? When you're collaborating, everyone must be comfortable. That's why our core principle is "keep it simple".

Just-in-time features

QuickTopic is simple to use right from the start. But when you want to do more, you can. For example, if you decide you want more than one topic forum, you can create as many as you want, and use QuickTopic's Shared Topics page to create a public index of topics that you and your group care about. We use this philosophy throughout QuickTopic's design: simplicity at first glance, but features that are there when you need them.

QuickTopic Features

Web-based Discussion – You easily create and manage discussions through a Web-based interface. Participants can easily view discussion threads and add their own comments.

Complete Email Integration – People naturally communicate via email, so QuickTopic is completely integrated with email. Participants in any discussion can work entirely within email, yet they get all the advantages of a web forum (like a central place to view the conversation) and a mailing list (such as disconnected viewing and composing). Below are specific email features.

• Move an email thread to QuickTopic – Regular email discussions can be instantly "upgraded" to QuickTopic by simply forwarding a group of email messages to a specific email address. We call this QuickThread^SM. A new discussion forum is created and seeded with theses email messages, and all the participants are subscribed and notified by email. The conversation can then continue naturally via email, but is captured in the QuickTopic web forum for central reference and archiving. QuickThread effectively lets you instantly create an ad hoc mailing list and web forum from any email conversation.
• Email Invitation – Discussion creators can easily invite other participants through email. Participants are notified of a discussion and are invited to participate by linking to a unique URL or replying through email.
• Emailing Comments – QuickTopic is distinct from common web forums in that it allows discussion participants to email comments and have them automatically posted in the discussion thread. Considering the feature below too, a QuickTopic forum is very much like an instant mailing list.
• Email Notification – Discussion participants can opt to receive email every time a new comment has been posted in a discussion, or receive a daily digest of comments.

Unique Discussion URL - QuickTopic automatically generates a long random unique URL for each discussion. This supports privacy and confidentiality of each topic, if that's desirable. Topics can also be linked to web pages to make them public and invite open participation.

RSS Feeds – Each topic has its own RSS feed, accessible by simply appending ".rss" to the topic's URL.

Personal and Public Indexes – QuickTopic's My Topics page provides personalized indexes of an individual’s own discussions. Anyone can also create a Shared Topics page from their My Topics list to provide a public index of selected discussions.

Administration – The individual starting the discussion can administer and control the discussion forum.

• Delete individual messages
• Delete the entire discussion or document
• Ban IP addresses (Pro version)
• Moderate posts (Pro version)
• Change the Data/Time display format
• Change the title
• Archive - Download comma-separated-value version of the discussion that’s readable by MS Excel.
• Disallow further posts

Topic Introduction (Pro version) – An introduction can be placed at the top of any web forum -- most useful for long-running conversations.

Upload Pictures (Pro version) – Participants can upload pictures to the web forum.