Meet the New MAX

Photo of the MAX Federal Community page.

Are you looking for a government-wide online collaboration tool that allows you to collaborate with your peers and manage communities and workflows?  Look no further — the new and improved MAX has a ton of features and functionality, to help you:

• Create a collaboration space for communities of practice
• Work simultaneously on documents
• Directly edit attachments with version control
• Employ a multi-stage workflow process
• Launch a data collection or poll
• Synchronize a community calendar with your own
• Manage membership lists

The beauty of the tool is that it’s been developed specifically to meet the needs of federal employees — so it’s also safe and secure, fully authenticated, 508-compliant, and free.

Who can use it?

MAX is an online collaboration workspace for federal executive branch employees with opportunities for state, local, and tribal government sponsored memberships.

Recently we migrated the Web Content Managers Forum community to MAX.  We now use MAX for collaboration among over 3,200 community members from across all levels of government and contractors with a government email address. We created an enclave space that allows us to manage different “types” of members with ease,  plus we can manage different levels of access to different types of content.

A few examples of how federal communities have been using MAX:

–  The .gov Reform Task Force used MAX Collect to gather agency data on federal domains.  MAX Collect allowed only certain people to input data based on email address, ensuring more control over the data collection.

– Smithsonian’s National Zoo created an enclave space to engage a non-federal audience of community experts. The collaboration space allowed them to easily share materials from an international symposium including agendas, discussion minutes and presentations.

– DOJ used a MAX federal community to manage a review process for their congressional reports. MAX provided them a flexible workflow for defining a unique number of reviews for any report, which could then be generated as Word or Excel docs.  It also provided a real-time dashboard display so DOJ could see at a glance where each report is in the review stage.

In early April we hosted a webinar with Mark Dronfield, MAX program manager from the Dept. of Education.  Watch the webinar to learn more about all the features MAX offers, and how they can help you collaborate and manage communities..

Join the Web and New Media Community on MAX!

If you have a MAX account, and want to stay up-to-date on Digital Government, join the Web and New Media Community on MAX.  It’s also a great way to connect wth other communities doing similar work, such as Open Government, E-Government and Budgets Groups.

If you don’t have a MAX account, it’s easy to register and get started.  What are you waiting for?