Hugh Pyle : Here's a useful construct for Groove tool developers, especially when working with third-party ActiveX controls for UI.

Informationweek : Microsoft aims to get into a Groove

Michael Helfrich : There is such a chasm between IT's view of collaboration, and the people they serve, and their view of collaboration.  Witness an interaction I had a few weeks ago with some folks who suggested that software vendors (and my company specifically) was making it too easy to work with others. 

ZDNet : Microsoft warned its employees in an email, that no swapping of music or other files is to occur using company PCs or networks.

Ashok Hingorani just notifyed me of the availability of a new Groovetool: Statusboard. It's a simple spreadsheet with the ability to set status indicators. Sheets can be assigned to certain members in a Groovespace and only those members will see the sheet in their drop down list.
Thnx Ashok, this might come in handy :-)

Sam Gentile: A big welcome to Paresh Suthar, who has taken the plunge into blogging. His Bio does not quite do him justice. He would be the last person to be touting his horn but I would like to for a minute. I have had the wonderful opportunity of working alongside Paresh for most of the last 7 months at Groove and found him to be one of the smartest and most capable developers I have met and worked with.

Groove Networks founder and CEO receives World Technology Award.

Ray Ozzie has started a Salon Weblog powered by Radio Userland. An interesting combination :-)

Internetweek : Microsoft, Groove Further Integration Of P-To-P, Portal Platforms

eWEEK : Groove Readies Microsoft Integration Kit

More on the Groove-Sharepoint integration announcement, this time from Computerworld

Infoworld : Microsoft deepens link to Groove

CNET : Groove tightens ties with Microsoft.

Some more info on the Sharepoint/Groove deal can be found on the Groove website including some screenshots.

Microsoft today announced that Groove Networks is working with Microsoft to integrate Groove Workspace, with SharePoint (TM) Team Service to provide customers with a team Web site solution that supports online and offline use and automatic synchronization, and works securely across company firewalls.

A promising introtext at Forrester Research on Groove and GSK. What a pity my guest account doesn't give acces to the fulll piece.

Sam Gentile reserved a category of his weblog for Groove related stuff. Better keep an eye on it. 

For my dutch readers:  i stumbled upon a translation of Jon Udell's review of Groove Workspace 2.0 on the dutch Infoworld website.

John Burkhardt: Yesterday at Groove Networks our Notes server went offline for a while.  A few people wandered the hallways feeling helpless, while the rest of us revelled in the advantages of a decentralized architecture and kept right on Grooving.

I've been thinking these last couple of days about Justin's remarks on the Groove transceiver. I understand his points and agree on a lot of his observations of how Groove's technology could and should be used to enrich existing applications without forcing people in a new environment but personally i really like the transceiver.

Maybe it's because I’ve grown accustomed to it over the last 1.5 years and learned to live with it's current shortcomings (performance, search, print) but what i really like about the transceiver is that it offers an intuitive user-friendly but very productive environment where new, less tech oriented, users feel at home very quickly. I have been introducing Groove to almost 100 people over the last year and my experience is that users are acclimatized within minutes and can get instantly productive. As a trained Architect (houses etc.) i became more aware of the importance of orientation points, aesthetics and intimacy for people to feel at home in a city, house or even software and in my opinion the Groove transceiver offers all that. It feels a bit like living in a nice old European towncentre. where your shared spaces resemble citysquares strongly embedded in the context of other spaces and people where yo go to discuss different subjects or work with different people. You know most of the people around and everything is within walking distance ;-)

btw Groove 2.0 also has the Groove explorer which is a more efficient environment to quickly glance through your spaces (did you try that, Justin ?) but i hardly use it myself probably because I’m so used to the transceiver and feel comfortable in it.

However there is allways room for improvement and both the transceiver and the explorer would benefit greatly if they became faster, more snappier. I know Groove Networks realizes this too and are working on a serious performance boost in the upcoming version and with the release of Groove’s edge services it will be possible to extend the benefits of the secured Groovespaces to a wide array of  user interfaces to all sorts of devices.

mmm, the Groovelog seems to be offline. I hope Agora gets it back up soon.
Update Groovelog is online again.

Groove is clearly gaining momentum here in the Netherlands, these last days i've been contacted by 2 seperate journalists that wanted to interview me about Groove. I had some very interesting conversations with both of them. 

David Gammel reacts on Mike Helfrich's piece on Technology Confined Collaboration

Justin Rudd thinks the Groove network is cool but doesn't like the transceiver, i guess that's why he keeps calling it the Transcender ;-)

Robert Cringely's notes from the field:

Cool, thanks to Tim, i now got a talking weblog. Click on the speaker-icon at the bottom of a post to have it read to you outloud. It uses a Text-to-speech WebService that Tim wrote using Visual Studio .NET and Festival, a speachengine created by the University of Edinburgh. I don't know if it adds real extra value to my weblog but i think it's kinda neat anyway ;-)

Sam also links to this interesting Devx article  

Sam Gentile reports on the development of the Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio.NET

Parallelspace announces the availability of eMail 1.2, the fully integrated Microsoft Outlook 2002 experience for Groove Workspace 2.0.

Mike Helfrich, VP of applied technology of Groove Networks, has started a weblog. Welcome to the neighbourhood !

The Groove/VS.NET presentation (1.5 mb) of this webcast is now available from this site. I especcially like the following statement:

If you can build a WinForm you can build your own  custom collaborative solution that offers:

• 
  
  Offline access


• 
  
  Automatic synchronization


• 
  
  Transparent Firewall traversal


• 
  
  192-bit encryption


• 
  
  .NET & Web service compatibility

In light of to the latest column of Jon Udell and the recent unveiling of the Palladium initiative, Hugh Pyle explains how Groove handles user authentication and data encryption:

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: Dutch, Netherlands, Rotterdam, Centre, Jeroen, Male, 31-35!

I missed last week's webcast on Groove, Sharepoint and  XP. Luckily there's a powerpoint available. Beware it's 3.5 mb so you'd better download it first.

The Groove website has got a new frontpage with a clear message. 

Ashok Hingorani reports good news in the hottest thread of the Grooveforums.

It's official,
it's wonderful
PoPG has been accepted
and will go on to add lustre to groove in the years to come
the force can now be truly unleashed
for barriers of location and even OS are no more.

but
the biggest winner
is Groove Inc itself.
for having stopped to hear what we were saying
for believing in it's users
and it's own mechanisms
this forum being one.

We now got a webservice to convert DWG/DXF CADfiles to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Lot's of possibilities to integrate it with our current CADviewer for Groove 2.0 or a third party webapplication. I still feel SVG is a bit slow but the benifits of having XMLbased graphics are obvious. Nice work Tim !!  

Andy Swarbs writes a powerfull testimony on the Groove forums:

I have recently been privilidged to partake of very serious intense, productive dialogue over Groove between some UK and US groovers. The efficacy of the activity in the space is truly awesome. Such "events" show how short Groove Networks sell themselves completely when they claim that "Groove is 10 times better than email" (even though I appreciate the under-selling). This is not the first time I have experienced such delights - but it is by far and away a most exemplary example. And I hope others have such experiences themselves, or will do soon.

The point of this thread is though to explore and express where groove is good and to look at it in light of recent exposes that are rocking the financial world - Enron, Xerox in the US and Vodafone, ITV Digital in the UK. My point is that when things get big they will inevitably tent to topple. As sure as eggs is eggs.

Enter Groove, an application which like no other can enable new small organisations to spring forth so much more effectively than any existing organisation. I hypothesise that orgnaisations that successfully deploy Groove from the ground up are far more likely to be the successful orgs of the future. Let me be conservative and use Groove Network's ratio and say they are "10 times more likely".

So why does groove help? Most groovers partaking of these forums will not be surprised to find on the list

a) groove is 10x better than email
b) groove builds strong very trusting powerful relationships
c) groove interactions closely mimic human interactions (well as close as computer-wise as is possible)
d) groove is a secure foundation on which to build and grow a business
e) groove is a reliable platform, eg does not require IT staff to do so much IT work so instead they can concentrate on the business
f) groove works from a company size of 1 - to 100 - to 1000 - and beyond - with no change of IT strategy

This adds up to a unique opportunity for us all. Most people who contribute to these forums, whether they express anguish and frustration or joy and benevolence are here and stay here because we see where we are heading. Not just "we" in the limited sense, but we in the global sense.

Here is the opportunity for the third world to get a hold on IT and be productive and compete on a much more level playing field. Here is the opportunity for new businesses to spring up and prosper like never before.

Think of what websites did for small companies. A small company can create a powerful visual message on their website making a small company look big and powerful to the outside world. But it does nothing for the company inside. That's where Groove comes in.

Yes sure, both the application and company both have growing pains, and some of them very unique as goes with the new world of P2P territory. Some of those pains have affected me at times such that I have said that "I will switch my computers off forever". But I have not. I am staying the course and we are all staying the course. And we will win.

Tim bakes a cool little flashtool that scans the headlines of weblogs.

In the final part of the Groove Tourbot tutorial , Hugh Pyle explains why he used HTML for the User Interface of the tourtool

I've used this sort of "HTML inside Groove" view in quite a few tools now. It still takes a non-trivial amount of development effort (to build the template page, script helpers etc), but if you need a clean, flexible, not-very-interactive UI it's definitely the way to go.

Hugh also provides an index of the five parts of the Tourtutorial. 

• The framework
  
• Stages and coordination
  
• Dynamics and latency
  
• More dynamics
  
• The user interface

Harm van der Meer of our company (Suite75) has started a weblog too.

Hugh Pyle continues to explain the technical aspects of the Groove Tourbot.

Jack Tuckerman asks on the Groove Forums: