Invity: Group Management in the Wave

Update: We've released the source code in our new blog post highlighting the technical details of Invity.

Have you ever come across the situation of inviting many people at once to a wave? For instance, assume you want to share a wave with all your friends or colleagues that are already participants of another wave. As of today, you would have to invite everyone separately to the new wave. In our project, we often found it annoying to invite the same group of people to lots of different waves. We would love to have some kind of group management, which is announced by Google but not yet implemented. However, as a workaround we developed our own solution, which we want to share with you today.

Invity the Inviter

We are happy to present Invity (pw-invity@appspot.com), a Google Wave robot that you can add to your waves. It can save all current participants of the wave as a named group. When you create a new wave and invite Invity, you are able to select a group and Invity automatically adds all members to the wave.

Invity in two simple steps:

1. Create the group

2. Invite the group to a new wave

Please try it out and give us feedback!

Later this week, we will publish some insights we gained during the development process in a more technical post. We also plan to publish Invity's source code.

Hello, Wave!

Half a year ago Google announced Wave, an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. While it already provides excellent features for live collaborative editing, communication in the Wave tends to be unstructured and chaotic. We are working on a project to support the execution of business processes inside Google Wave and provide guidance to users. In particular we are looking at two use cases: publishing an online newspaper and modelling business processes in the Wave.

We are seven software engineering students at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. This project is part of our bachelor's degree and we are supervised by the Business Technology Group of Professor Weske at Hasso Plattner Institute. We are excited to work with Google Wave and in this blog we will share our experiences. During our project we will also create a number of gadgets and robots we would like to share with you to get your feedback.

Stay tuned!