Tim can't stop experimenting and is now busy creating a Flash MX client which uses SOAP to connect to a webservice. Most interesting. Tim and I firmly believe in the potential of Flash MX to create userfriendly applications and our company has been creating some businesstools like this 2D online office planner and this 2D/3D massstudy tool . By extending these applications to Groove and connect them to a webservice, they become very powerful for collabarative tasks.

Our Architect0r tool is an example of a simple flash designtool in Groove and has been downloaded over 500 times these last 2 months. However we didn't get a lot of feedback so if anyone wants to comment on this tool please do. btw Nico, Tim and I have been working on a new 2D/3D Web-Groove tool that will be exposed soon, stay tuned..

Stephen Dulaney has started a weblog, he writes:

What convinced me to participate in the value creation process knowledge on the internet. I have been a great user of Groove for years and the attempts to integrate groove and radio pushed me over the edge. I think I have some ideas and experience to contribute.

ZDNet : Is IM ready to do business ?

Sources expect Microsoft to tap Groove Networks, the peer-to-peer software company founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, for at least some of the internal communications technology mentioned by Allchin. Microsoft invested $51 million in the company last fall.

Groove Workspace version 2.0b is available now. 2.0b is a maintenance update that contains "behind the scenes" enhancements.

Don't forget today's webcast at 3.00 est:  Unlocking the Collaborative Power of the Knowledge Worker (Registration closes 2 hours prior to the event start time)

Join Matt Howard, VP Business Development, of Groove Networks and Thom Robbins of Microsoft to learn how Groove combined with products such as SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft Exchange and Windows/Office XP, can unlock the collaborative power of your company's knowledge workers.

Tim made a Groovetool to play chess with a webservice using SOAP. Install at your own risk, i just won a game! :-)

More info on the Groove/Corechange solution.

Users will be able to view, manage and access Groove software's collaborative shared spaces from within their portal. Through Corechange's role-based access mechanism, which is built on Microsoft's Active Directory, Groove users can now target specific roles, groups and communities for participation in a Groove shared space. through the integration of Coreport and Groove, a portal and its enterprise assets can serve as a central delivery point for content and documents, while Groove software facilitates small team interaction around the portal content. Corechange's Connectors for Groove are available now.

Ray Ozzie was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council last week. 

Corechange forms alliance (PDF) with Groove Networks to enhance collaboration capabilities of its portal software. For more info check out this NWF article or the Corechange website. 

Hugh Pyle: The question of how to connect Groove to the "outside world" has several answers. I'm constantly amazed by Tim's ability to cook up code overnight: he's now running a webservice inside a Groove tool, with bidirectional Web access. This is really powerful - a "view-level" parallel of the "model-level" SOAP stuff we're calling Edge Services.

Update on Tim's latest experiment, check this page were you can participate in a discussion in a Groovespace just using your browser.

Our CTO, Tim Knip can't get enough of it, he writes:

Also busy with a Groove Tool which retrieves messages from POP-boxes and publishes subject and body as a RSS-newsfeed. Hehe: I'm now subscribed to my email-account's newsfeed in Radio Userland. The tool can also send email to your favourite smtp-server. Mmmm, yet another way to publish Groove content? Thanks Jon Udell for inspiration.

Encouraging news for 3rd party Groove developers: an official reaction from David Scult, VP of Groove Networks on some of the questions asked by Ashok in the Groove Forums. Thanks !

We plan on implementing a phased approach that will in the longer term allow authorized partners to resell Groove with value added solutions. Initially, we plan on working with you via phone so you can purchase Groove seats on behalf of your customers. You will then be able to provide to provide your customers with an invoice, and be able provision (distribute product activation keys) Groove seats to customers. More process details will follow in the upcoming weeks. With your input and assistance, we believe this change meets your needs to provide your customers a more postive experience. This includes local representation by you, as well as the convenience of receiving just one invoice for their purchases of Groove software and your solutions.

Now, let me address our Thin Client strategy. Within the next few weeks, you (Partners) will receive information about our Thin client strategy. This strategy is part of a much broader strategic initiative to provide a SOAP interface to Groove Shared Spaces for devices other than "full Groove Clients." Many of you have some general awareness about this strategy which is currently codenamed "Groove Edge Services". This initiative will allows users to gain programmatic access to Groove data from browsers, PDA's and other non-WinTel platforms.

Just returned home with Wolf after a 9 day "vacation" in the wonderful Rotterdam birthhotel. Good to see Dave is back too :-)

Tim takes on Hugh's weekend challenge and bakes a Groovetool which acts as a HTTP-server to send data into a Groovespace and to publish content from a Groove shared space.

A new 3rd party Groovetool: Instant Project by Team Direction.

Hugh Pyle writes some more on the Groove Tour Bot:
The aim of the tour framework is to make a little, generic, "conversation engine" inside Groove. The first application of this is a self-paced guided tour of Groove. You begin with some slideware, introducing Groove Workspace. Then an instant message arrives from a co-worker (a bot). You reply to the message, and wind up inviting this "person" into your shared space. Then you add some tools, and hold (primitive) conversations using those tools (and chat).

Steve Yost disagrees with David Weinberger's assertion:
Lots of organizations are extremely interested in collaborative tools now. The main reason they can't successfully adopt collaborative technology is because you can't get people to all go use new technology at once, yet in the face of simple email and browser use, that's what's necessary: the new technology usage has to be unanimous. If one person in a group can't or won't use the new tech, the forum reverts to the least common denominator -- ubiquitous email. (Link via Jon's radio)

David Weinberger: The benefits of using collaboration software are multiple and manifest. So, why aren't organizations more interested in using it? One explanation: We are in the realm not of scientifical business management but organized religion. The issue isn't business efficiency but the maintenance of power. Collaboration software does indeed hyperlink the hierarchy. And that's just plain scary to The Establishment, the status quo and/or The Man. The price of admission is business' corrupt soul.

The 10 minute guide to Groove 2.0 is now shipping.

Mark Smith from Virtual Methods notified me about this interesting thread about the integration of Groove and SharePoint portal server. Tnx Mark.

Some important issues are being discussed on the Groove forums regarding Groove's strategy. As a third party developer, i'm very interested in any official GN response in this thread.

Internetweek: Collaboration's Promise: Faucets Produced Faster, Cheaper

Boston Globe Online: Technology for teamwork

If you're the type of person who isn't actively seeking to work very closely with partners and colleagues, says Ozzie at Groove, you're going to stick out like a sore thumb. People will have to learn how to be good electronic collaborators.

I guess i won't be online a lot the next couple of days to report on Groove because today 15 june 2002 at 00:37 CET i became a proud daddy of a beautiful baby boy called: Wolf Bekkers . Both mother and Wolf are doing fine. 2 Pictures are below and if you want to see more, check out this little movieclip of Wolf discovering his vocal capabilities to terrorize his parents in the future ;-)

     

What is Ray Ozzie reading to make sense of a dangerous world ? Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. The book argues that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda are near-perfect embodiments of a networked organization. Ozzie explains:

In the battle against small, dispersed organizations, it is unlikely that the massive, centralized organization will achieve success -- but neither will the wholly decentralized organization. The winning formula is a combination of the two: an organization that can use tremendous force when necessary, even as it enables specialist groups to work together in a decentralized manner.

Today is the your last chance to vote for the Infoworld Readers' Choice Awards 2002

Matt Pope and Jon Udell reflect on the Groove/Radio experiment.

PTC rolled out a new version of its computer-aided design software: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire™ that integrates previously separate collaboration functionality into the core product. The product been enhanced with Groove, so that engineers can connect with counterparts and hand off control of documents as they're being revised. [link via Banktech]

Tim is doing some more work on the Groovespace publisher concepttool. For now it publishes the outliner-tool, the discussion-tool and the notepad-tool. Click here to view the webmirror of a Public Groove Space. As a test i also added this output to my weblog  (at the bottom of my list of links) It will be dynamicly updated as the Groovespace grows.

Tim shows how to display the contents of a Groove discussiontool in a single weblog post. Nice!!  This is the OPML of the public Groove/Radio space:
 

I closed down the public Groove-Radio space, it has served it's purpose. Jon Udell agrees.

John Burkhardt: Nobody stated that the conversation was public or private - it just spiralled organically.  It does beg for more control - Groove says that its all private and the Web says that its all public.  So is there a middle ground?

John, i'm sorry i didn't state more cleary that this was a public space to begin with. I started the space to have an open discussion on possible Groove/Radio integration scenarios and i posted the link on my website to catalyze the free flow of ideas and to experiment with Groove onramps. I wrote somewhere in the discussion that people should edit their posts if they were uncomfortable with it being exposed to a larger group but i guess i should have made this statement louder. I strongly agree with you that the policies concerning private and public data is an very important issue and i guess the experiments of the last few days only made us more aware of it. 
btw The public discussion space has served it's function and we'll probably shut it down soon. The transcripts of the discussion are published to the web, content only without names, for future reference.

Jon Udell writes a nice summary of what happened the last few days

Tim has exported the Groove-Radio integration discussion that took place in the public Groovespace to the web. The export was done using a Groove-tool which reads the discussion-Tool and creates an OPML. It's has been a very productive discussion and by publishing it's contents to the web using Radio we're doing something similar to what Michael  described last week:

Q: What happens to edge-based content as it ages? e.g. a richly populated Groove shared space
A: As soon as the content can be indexed and searched, it may physically live at the edge but logically, it becomes a center-based resource.

IM: Five Corporate trends on ZDNet

Rainer Volz : So will Microsoft, pushed forward by Groove Networks, once more take the lead in the industry - this time with a combination of powerful trends: publishing information with weblogs, web services, and P2P collaboration? Currently it looks like the old and successful MS strategy is used: provide eager users with cheap tools and support them finding good solutions. After the grassroots movement takes off, these solutions will perfected to be used in the enterprise market. Anybody willing to compete?

Hugh Pyle is doing some interesting Groove onramp experiments 

Send Groove instant messages from a Web form here.
Create Groove shared spaces (and invite people) from a Web form here.
Hyperlink from the Web into Groove spaces here.

Steve Gillmore: Memo to Bill Gates

Forget about the next Office. You can combine HailStorm, Groove services, and Internet Explorer today to create a self-replicating peer service that gathers private, shared data from e-mail, Weblog postings, and automated agents.

An insightful look at Groove 2.0 on ZDNet India by Ashok Hingorani

Hugh Pyle: the Radio web is a peer-to-peer information network, where the routers are humans.

Jon Udell: Onramps, Offramps, Groove and Blogs

A quicker onramp allready. The Groove-Radio discussion space can now also be injected by one click (Netscape/Opera users: right-click and save the file, then double-click) tnx Tim :-)

Pablo Corral mailed me last week that he would be interested in a public Groove space as a compliment to my weblog to discuss general Groove news. I did setup a space but didn't post the link on my blog yet. The space makes use of Hugh's Newsclient tool to bring the feeds of my and other Grooved weblogs into the space to be discussed there. Still want to do some thinking if this is the proper setup and also don't want to fragment the very lively dicussion in the Groove-Radio space at this moment, but i will make it available soon. 

Andy Swarbs has been setting up and maintaining interesting public Groovespaces for some time now. The spaces are grouped into families. A space in a family has cross links to each other. By joining the parent space you can thence find out what all the member spaces are and join individual space, as you wish on a subject of your choice. Two Special Intrest Groove Spaces (Sigs) have just been added: Sigs-Medical and Sigs-Elearning with editor-manager Kc Bolton.

Lots of activity in the public Groovespace i started yesterday., Hugh Pyle, Tim Knip , Jon Udell, Matt Pope, John Burkhardt, Michael Herman and others are discussing possible integration scenario's for Groove and Radio. For people who would like to join this discussion , right click on this link and save the .grv file to your desktop. Then open it and you'll be invited to this space. (I'm sure better onramps from Radio to Groove from will appear soon.)

Jon Udell:  I would love it if, in the kind of situation Matt describes -- where an issue arises in blogspace that really does require more tightly-coupled interaction -- I could experience Groove instead of email as the framework for that interaction. If you are a Groove user, find yourself in such a situation, and would like to involve me in a short-term discussion, please do invite me into a Groove space made for that purpose.

Tim and I just created a Groovespace to continue this conversation, anyone who is interested can contact me and i'll send you an invitation.

Matt Pope on Dialog, Radio and Groove

When the conversation merits multi-channel, synhronous dialog, a natural and seamless transition into a Groove shared space from Radio would be very cool. Within Groove, the communication is private and secure between the small group of individuals that need to be intimately engaged. It's like email except exponentially better because it truly is secure, and it is more dynamic, and it can be synchronous, and it can incorporate context (e.g. documents, pictures, markup, etc.) more readily. When the Groove communication ends, the thread, along with any supporting data, can be integrated back to the Radio environment for a wider audience to see. That would be nice. With Tim Knip's wares and edge services, this type of integration is becoming much simpler.

Tim Knip: Got it!... Took me all day, but  made a SOAP-call from Groove to a custom Radio Userland Web Service using Groove's SOAP-API. So, this means a Groove Tool can retrieve info from anyone running Radio, but the service could also make Radio do usefull things like 'editPost' etc... Soon, with Edge Services, Radio-clients can make SOAP-calls to a Groove Tool...

Knowledge Management World reviews Groove workspace 2.0

Groove's real business value is accessibility to individual users and its flexibility to adapt on the fly to the needs of any given group. Even if other members of an ad hoc team do not already have Groove, they can install it and be collaborating within minutes.

Another interesting webcast, broadcasted on 27 june by Microsoft & Groove: Unlocking the Collaborative Power of the Knowledge Worker

Lots of activity in Parallelspace (Canadian Groove partner) David Sharple  joins their management team and Michael Herman has picked up his blog again. He writes:

Q: What happens to edge-based content as it ages? e.g. a richly populated Groove shared space
A: As soon as the content can be indexed and searched, it may physically live at the edge but logically, it becomes a center-based resource.

Q: What is Google?
A: Google is the world's largest distributed document management system++.

Newsfactor: Instant Messaging enterprise security ramps up. 

Research firm Gartner has estimated that there are now more than 100 million IM users worldwide, and that by 2005, IM will be used more often than e-mail.Gartner also has estimated that corporations using IM could reduce internal e-mail volume by 30 to 40 percent, and voice mail volume by 10 to 15 percent.

Ashok Hingorani on the Groove forums:

Cadviewer from Suite75 works beautifully for joint navigation of massive CAD drawings even on my dial up - awesome.

:-)) btw If anyone else is interested taking the Beta of our CADViewer for a testdrive, let me know.

Check out Tim's new and improved Groovey weblog