John Burkhardt reports on the development of Groove's Edge Services and he's looking forward to our experiments with it. So are Tim and I ;-)

The goal was to make it as painless as possible to add support to a Groove tool that enables it to be callable from SOAP.  I took some inspiration from .NET.  If you have ever created a web service with .NET you will notice that you don't ave to touch anything SOAP, nor XML.  But if you want to you can.  I hope I got that right.  After my fourth iteration - ok, its taken a while to get it right - I finally have something that I'm pretty proud of!

This looks like an interesting free webcast to attend: It's presented by Thom Robbins from Microsoft and will be held on 8 july. You can register here.

Building Collaborative Decentralized Applications with Visual Studio.NET and Groove. In this technical webinar, we will outline Groove's current support for Windows Forms, and give a first glimpse at the upcoming Groove for Visual Studio.NET add-in module.

Tim Aiello: I'd love to publish my Groove content in OPML or XML or some such thing.

Dave Winer wrote today:

I get my news of Groove from Jeroen Bekkers. I read his site every time it updates. They're doing some wild and crazy things. Notably, connecting Groove to Radio Community Server and OPML. At first I thought -- oh my god -- I'm going to have to serve all those Groove users. Then I relaxed. Let's give it a try. It wasn't how I initially thought we'd connect, but if it works, let's go for it. 

Thanks Dave, nice to be read :-)) Groove and Radio are the two favourite tools in our company and Tim is doing some experiments on how to connect them and have the best of both worlds, taking his mind of the great job he did on our CADViewer for Groove, waiting for the betatest results ;-)   

Tim Knip:  Now I can publish the contents of several Groove tools using the RU-community server + XML-RPC. Check out this OPML created from an Outliner Tool in Groove, and then sent to the RU-server using xmlStorageSystem.SaveMultipleFiles. This concept can be used for almost every Tool in Groove.

Matt Pope, Product manager for Groove's Egde services, points to an interesting interview with him on DevX. (+  bonus photo)

We will offer Groove platform objects (COM interfaces) as SOAP services, callable from either a remote application or from a local application, Whereas Web services are primarily about application-to-application integration, Edge Services extend the reach of Groove's network.

Groove Edge Services later this year will provide a developer's kit containing a set of open SOAP APIs that allow developers to expose Groove objects and data to any SOAP-compliant client environment.

Had a talk with a client yesterday who was impressed with Groove but had some questions on how to manage and control large numbers of Groove accounts within a company. When i checked the Groovesite for some additional information i saw that they just added a page that sums up nicely Groove's Enterprise Readiness,  thanx :-)

Technology Forecast 2002-2004, a book by the PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Centre, features an interview with Ray Ozzie. An exerpt of this interview can be found on the Groove website.

Tim Knip: Check out my first file uploaded from Groove!

Dan Gillmor: Building harmony through the Internet.

Corporations will have to get used to this kind of information flow, which ignores organization charts and punches through firewalls. But this is the way people actually behave in real life -- moving from one small group to another, for the most part -- and it can be much more efficient.

Tim is doing some more experiments on Groove, XML-RPC and OPML. He  reports about it on his weblog:

1. Groove shared spacemembers can setup the tool to connect to a RU account of choice.
   
2. Groove shared spacemembers can send/edit posts to the same blog.
   
3. Groove Outliner-tool entries can be sent to the RU-account as an OPML-file.
   
4. Virtually everything stored in a Groove-space can be sent to the RU-account as OPML, HTML, whatever....

2 more or less Groove related articles in this issue of Fortune Magazine . One about Groove's Partner Intraspect and one on Groove user Esther Dyson with some quotes from Ray Ozzie.

C|NET reviews Groove 2.0:
Despite a few rough spots, this newfangled instant messenger on steroids shines. Businesses looking for a low-cost way to collaborate across departments should give it a go.

Hugh Pyle writes:
A sneak preview of the Groove Tour is live! (this is the project which has kept me up at night for the past while). Click here to begin. Let me know what you think.

Symbiant Group's new Tool. MediaTeam for Groove is now available for download and purchase.

With MediaTeam, Groove users can share and review media (audio & video) files together within a Groove 2.0 Workspace. With the unique Team Review mode, media files can be played on everyone's computer in a synchronized fashion. Imagine being able to stop and start a media file on all of your team member's computers during a meeting! MediaTeam also provides the capability for users to capture thoughts and comments for each media file.

Sample chapter + code of Phil's new book is available at the official Groovesite.

Netsenger, a japanese company, will be releasing a new Groovetool in June 2002. 

The Acquisition Tool will help you to see a view without changing your file. You can write anything on the view screen like painting. You can also see the process of changes later.

There seems to be a lot of intrest in the the Radio Bloggertool, thanks Dave for the the traffic ;-) 

Dries asks: Have you looked ar Drupal as a collaborative weblogging tool ?

I think i have to clarify some things on the Groove Bloggingtool that Tim built . The main idea behind this experiments is not to create a new collaborative weblogging tool but to investigate simple solutions to publish selective content from a Groovespace you would like to make available to a broader audience. Every tool made for Groove is per definition a collaborative tool and this blogging tool is no exception. It's a nice gimmick that it supports realtime collaborative blogging, i see you typing and can add or edit your words before we decide to hit post but what's more interesting is that it provides an easy way to publicly share the data you want to share from within the Groovespace like news, decisions made, important dates and events or reports of the usage of the particular space. People could check the weblog before joining or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep informed of the progress made in a space without ever joining it. Lots of possibilities and scenarios are possible here. 
btw: If want to take the Radio tool for a spin stay tuned. Tim is doing some refining on the tool and the Radio version will be publicly available very soon (much more basic bloggertool is allready available)

Eweek reviews Groove 2.0 

Groove Workspace 2.0 Professional Edition equips users with an impressive array of tools for getting group work done over the Internet. In addition, the Groove client boasts enough extensibility to ensure that those tools with which the product does not ship can be created or purchased from one of Groove's solution partners.

Hugh pointed to this Groove Webcast. You'll have to register to view but i must say it's really worth it. Go check it out!! I think i'm gonna show this 38 minute show to all our (potential) Groove customers.

Phil Stanhope's Book Get into the Groove is ready for shipping. Phil gave us a copy of the book on CD during the Rotterdam Conference and it's an absolute musthave for anyone who is developing or wants to develop for Groove. Great sample tools included. Jack Ozzie writes in his foreword:

"Phil Stanhope delivers what I consider to be a recipe-based approach to building tools and applications for the Groove decentralized communications platform. Phil isn’t just a short-order cook; he’s a master chef."

We are testing a version of Tim's Groove Bloggingtool that updates to a Radio Weblog and that enables realtime collaborative blogging. Because of this i have been nosing in the archives of the Decentralization group. Dug up lots of interesting stuff especcially this conversation between Dave Winer,Ray Ozzie and others about the way to connect Groove to Radio. Ray describes some examples in June 2001:

1) Public directory publisher (pushing out of groove)
A user adds a tool to a Groove shared space that enables the users of that space to configure it so that it publishes (probably using XML-RPC or SOAP) a brief summary of the shared space, along with a .GRV invitation file, to a web server. The best outcome, of course, is to create a server that is an aggregator of such things, perhaps itself republishing these as RSS. (If one wished to get fancy, this could be extended to optionally publishing the members' vcard/contact info for outside aggregation.)

2) Group blog editor (bidirectional integration)
The concept is a group editing UI for, say, a Manila weblog. A user would add a tool to a Groove shared space that is, in essence, a "connector" tool. The tool would be responsible, say, for connecting an existing Groove Discussion tool's data model into something like Manila. It would probably work best more as a replicator than as something that does "open" and "save", if you catch my drift.

3) Group news tool (pulling into groove)
The concept is a group who wants to stay informed. A user would add a tool to a Groove shared space that is, in essence, a "news tool". The tool would be responsible for pulling aggregated news feeds into the tool on a periodic basis so that its members can stay informed. It could use an embedded browser control to display the news items, etc. Whether the tool itself does the aggregation, or whether the tool regularly downloads from one of your servers that does the aggregation on its behalf, is unknown; both are clearly possible.

Hugh has done great work on scenario 1 with Rendezvoo.net and on scenario 3 with his Newsclienttool. Looks like Tim's Radio Groovetool is an example of the functionality described in scenario 2.  

From today Suite75 news will be maintained using Userland Radio  technology. Check it regular for IT News for the building industry. Suite75 creates innovative solutions using Groove, XML, VRML, OpenGL, CAD, Flash, .NET and Radio userland.

Article in last months edition of  the New Architect magazine:
Making connections, Emerging platforms for Peer to peer application development.

The Groove platform is much closer to completion than Jxta. It caters to developers who are looking to refine and add to Groove's standard groupware environment, to tailor the product for specific businesses and industries. The Enterprise Integration Server add-on further serves this goal by giving Groove developers a head start in integrating with business applications and data stores.

Bad news those wo are interested in competing with Groove but haven't start working on their product,  this Ebay auction of a complete P2P/IM system for only 1,5 million dollars has just ended ;-)

Just paid a short visit to my uncle Ben and couldn't resist to add this page to his favourites when i saw his computer,  Hi oom Ben ;-)

Michael Herman of Parallelspace has started a weblog, Michael is an active part of the Groove Developer Community and i expect his weblog will be filled with a lot of interesting Groove thoughts in the near future.

Mindjet and Groove Networks announced an alliance designed to help business teams plan and complete projects faster and within budget. The alliance will provide a collaborative visual project planning solution that gives enterprises the unique capability to unite business professionals in cross-organizational and cross-agency teams.

Parallelspace creates subsidiary to launch its SoftPass™ Peer Activation Software Services for peer-to-peer software and electronic content licensing and activation.

PC Magazine reviews Groove Workspace 2.0  

Groove 2.0 offers an excellent collaboration solution for project teams of any size.

Tim is doing some more experiments and has started a Radio weblog that can be edited from a Groovespace using RPC-XML.

hehe, it's my birthday so probably no Groove news today ;-)

Netrana's Spotdealmaker upgrades to Groove 2.0

Using SpotDealmaker and Groove, individual trading partners conduct instantaneous, simultaneous, bilateral transactions with each other on a direct, person-to-person basis. Together Netrana and Groove support the exchange of highly structured business transaction messages (negotiations, RFQs, RFPs, etc.) without central control of the process.

CRN Article: Notes on the Lotus Notes saga

Pundits are now watching carefully to see whether Groove's technology will give Microsoft something it has never really had--a viable groupware/collaboration product that can compete head-on with Lotus Notes and Domino.

hehe, just found a copy of my weblog on Nuzee.com when i was playing around with KartOO (tip from Hugh)

Useful Groove 2.0 tip: How do i assign a task in the advanced project toolset to somebody who has not installed Groove ?

Using Groove for Online learning is being discussed in the Groove forums and the reports are promising. Dr Rick Lillie from CSU writes:

"I really like Groove. By combining my website + Groove + other programs like Impatica, I have been able to deliver "blended" distance learning courses that offer the best of the live classroom and the online virtual classroom."

"This enables me to conduct "virtual office hours" and be available to my students when they need me. I realize this has both its good points and its bad points, but so far, my students have found that they get far more of my attention through Groove than they did through traditional class time + office hours."

A small manual for the Groove bloggertool has been created by Tim. (I wonder when the first weblog maintained with this tool will appear). In time i think it would be interesting to use the tool to collaborative create a Radio RSS/XML feed from a particular Groovespace. If needed this feed can be used to share some public, less sensitive data and keep a broader range of people informed on what takes place in that Groovespace. The feed can be published on the internet or intranet filling a gap between a public website and a secure Groovespace. It could also be used to quickly glance the progress if you have a lot of different spaces by subscribing to these feeds. Combined with a tool like the Hugh's Newsclient tool you could do this all in from within one Groovespace.

Tim did some work on his Bloggertool for Groove and released a free beta version. It can be used for collaborative blogging from within a Groovespace or to maintain your own Blog offline. The tool defaultlocation is set to post to this Blog but you can change this location within the tool. Radio is next.......

I added a list of 3rd party Groovetools to this weblog. (re)installed all the free tools to verify the links and they worked properly on my Groove 2.0. I might have forgotten one or two tools so contact me if you notice a tool is missing from the list.

Can't seem to reach Nico, hope he reads me weblog so he can contact me....

Mindjet's Mindmanager Preview edition for Groove 2.0 is now available for download. Just installed it, (needed to restart my Groove once  for proper install) and it works beautiful. I've played around a lot with Agora Mindmap tool but Mindmanager for Groove takes brainstorming and mindmapping in Groove to the next level.  I know i'm gonna use this tool a lot in the future. :-)

Although most of the technical terms are abacadabra to me, it seems that Groove's security is thoroughly tested.;-)

Advisor.com: Collaboration guru Ray Ozzie takes Groove P2P from "cool" to "corporate" by adding integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook, stronger administration features, and increased security.

The LAtimes article Get into the Groove with version 2.0 of two days ago is now also available without online registration.

Want to work for Groove Networks? They seem to be hiring.

Two more articles on Pim Fortuyn that give more insight in what is happening at this moment in Rotterdam and the Neherlands.

• National Review Online: Murder in Holland 


• Adam Curry: The big lie
  

Congratulations to John Burkhardt ;-)

Just been to the house of Pim Fortuyn, it's 500 meters from our offices. It was a very impressive silent display of disbelief, grief and devistated hope. Adam curry's weblog is constant source of news and gives a balanced view on who Pim Fortuyn was.

ZDnet brings a special report on P2P technologies , featuring four articles

1. Enterprise P2P: Flexibility and ROI


2. Fast growth forecast for enterprise P2P


3. A solution looking for a problem


4. Enterprise P2P platforms

I'm very shocked on the murder on the Rotterdam politician Pim Fortuyn, yesterday was a black day for the Netherlands and it's democracy. 

Informationweek: Email is moving to a broader business purpose

Groove's philosophy foreshadows what many expect will be the future of E-mail: a launching pad to a universe of productivity and collaboration tools. "You can provide people with all the tools in the world," says Groove systems engineer Nicholas Yerkes, "but they're going to use what's easy, and they're used to E-mail." Gartner analyst Rob Batchelder says the company's technology "is two years ahead of the world" and believes it could represent the desktop platform of the future.

LA Times: Get into the Groove with version 2.0. You'll have to register to read this article. Nice quote from the journalist:

In the business news department of the Associated Press, we're now using the software to track stories in a small work group. After just a few weeks of "grooving," it's hard to imagine going back to using ledgers to do the same thing.

Just tried Antcity, it's made in flash and very funny in a beautiful Simcity stylee 

ok, this looks like heaven, gotta make some big bucks quick ;-)

My ideal PC is getting near but Is there a tablet in your future? PC Magazine reports on the current state of the tablet market. Groove is mentioned in the article as one of the companies who are integrating digital inking into their software. During Bill Gates' keynote speech on the Comdex 2001 a prototype of Groove for the Tablet PC was allready showcased.

Ray Ozzie  in nov 2001 :"The advantage of the Tablet PC is that users can create ink and voice documents or document annotations with the ability to format, search and integrate those documents with other collaborative tools, allowing users to have conversations with greater context. Almost daily I have conversations on the phone with business associates and partners where I could use the ability to sketch a picture, or visually share and annotate a document to enhance the communication. "

Tim Knip has reopened his Radio weblog. Next to the final tuning of the Suite75 CADviewer, he's also playing around with some interesting code that Hugh has provided for the bloggertool for Groove 2.0. This tool was hardly used during the conference for which it was created because it crashed on one of the machines. I now have it installed in a space and i experienced no problems at all. Seems that the machine was the the problem not the code.

Symbiant released another free skin for Groove 2.0 called "America". The name is pretty obvious when you see the skin ;-). The skin was showed among some other cool groovey stuff by Wolfgang von Stuermer during the Rotterdam event.

My pregnant sister just send me a nice echo, her Bob is scheduled only 10 weeks after our Urk. The renevation of the house is picking up speed and the conference was a very good event. Sun is shining :-))

Today, Peer-Development officially released their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool for Groove 2.0. A try and buy version is available from their site. I testdrived this P4CRM tool and was very impresed by the usability.

An interesting scenario for Groove is being discussed in the Groove Forums. Using Groove to build a support network for someone who is terminally ill or facing a serious illness or disability.

The GGF (Global Grid Forum) merges with the P2PWG (Peer-to-Peer Working Group). This new organization now has industry support from companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Groove Networks, Fujitsu, and Hitachi.

Internetweek article: A new development sweetspot reports on some the next generation  webservices and applications that are emerging.

"So-called blogging tools like Radio Userland and Blogger, along with emerging peer-to-peer platforms like Groove, are evolving into relatively easy-to-use frontends - back-ended with sophisticated distributed computing technologies like SOAP interfaces, RSS engines, and P-to-P messaging infrastructures"