Infoworld : Vendors ready for Tablet OS

Officials at Groove, in Beverly, Mass., are excited about the possibilities that the Tablet PC inspires, said Matt Pope, Groove's product manager. "Conceptually, it is a hardware platform in line with the Groove principles. [It will] work the way people work -- the way people come together in an ad hoc way to get stuff done," Pope said. To that end, the Groove plan "over time" is to make digital ink a native data type across the Groove work space, starting within Chat, Pope said.

Volker Weber points to a German Groove article in Computerwoche.

Joel Spolsky touches some important points regarding Groove.

Ray Ozzie made an analysis of the usage of Groovespaces :

The analysis does indeed validate that the 2-25 design center of the product is precisely the sweet spot of where it's being used in practice:  approximately 35% of shared spaces are between a single pair of individuals, 60% of shared spaces are between 3 and 25 individuals, and 5% of shared spaces have more than 25 individuals.  Amazingly to me - given the design center of the UI - I found that within this 5% there are actually hundreds of spaces with 100-250 members each; I'd surely never have expected this.

One other incredibly fascinating tidbit: 25% apparently use shared spaces with only themselves as a member, using Groove as a "briefcase" to transparently and securely synchronize files across multiple computers that they own - e.g. Office documents being synchronized between home and office PCs.

Yet another Groove related weblog popped up. KC Bolton started a blog dedicated to eLearning for the 21st century. They will be launching some Groovebased solutions for educational purposes soon.

Ashok Hingorani now has a radio weblog too.

Ashok Hingorani, Indian Groove Guru and by far the most active poster on the Groove forums (over 2000 posts) has started a weblog. He kicks off his blog by announcing 3 new Groove-tools and a fair warning :

So far i have been playing with groove, for groove and others. now I really need to ask you all what tool is most important to you, and what would you like to see done to it to make it perfect. and that you would pay for. what capabilities / tools are totally missing, and you would like us to address. to test the waters i am releasing 3 tools, each a concept, that i hope you will find fine tuned to a need yours !

1. Matrix - multiple 2D workdsheets in a single tool, assignable to one or more members. privacy in a public space, what everyone has been wanting. Plus - it has a neat private chat, per worksheet, with, believe it or not, unread marks and even a bell!!
why can't groove do this if i can ?? available now at www.apwiz.com/matrix.htm
plus an import / export to excel for easy printing and use of templates for anything from RFQ's / Project Costing / departmental Budgets - and it has RAG capabilities for quick status tracking!

2. DBConnector - simple yet totally useful. Import data from any external database, even add to it and edit it in groove, graph it if you like, but above all, share real data from MDB's, SQL. even .DBF files in groove, without the high overhead of Enterprise Integration Server. Under test, out in 1 week, your inputs already welcome. Thanks to SB for prodding this development and my long time freind, partner, guru, Roomy, for building the .dll, to handle every variation, from XML formats to creating a simple remote web service tool so you can safely share data, from anywhere, even across firewalls.

3. a true mail client - no outlook or any thing else - straight to your mail server, into groove. share it with others in a space or just enjoy the experience of a totally secure mail environment - now your contact list will not spawn a thousand viruses.
product under local testing, you can play with it in 2 weeks. inputs welcome now

boy, i warned you, do not open pandora's box by putting me on a blog...

Congratulations to Paresh, who just has been officially promoted to dad. May your nights be long and filled with sleep ;-) 

I just received my planeticket to Boston. I'll be there 16-23 september to visit Groove headquarters and to attend the PGPA meeting. PGPA stands for Professional Groove Partner Assocation, this loosely coupled network of innovative companies was formed during the Groove Rotterdam Conference that we held this spring. I'm really looking forward to this 2nd meeting and to meet, Ashok, Hugh, Phil, Michael, Andy, Wolfgang, Mark, Forrest and the all others again :-)

An interesting discussion is taking place on Vowe.Net around the question if Groove could or should use their own product for their customer service and support forums.

Paresh Suthar points to the webversion of the monthly Groove bulletin

A new German site dedicated to Groove has been launched : www.groove-now.de  developed by On2trade

Steve Gillmor : Notes is dead

According to police reports, Notes was killed by inventor Ray Ozzie, 45. Ozzie entered the Notes space on the Ides of August -- Aug. 15, 2002 -- armed with Version 2.1 of the Groove collaboration platform and its new peer-to-peer e-mail functionality. Notes, already weakened by years of assault by Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook team, was finished off in recent days by  Ozzie's commandeering of another growing collaboration model: Weblogs

Jon Udell's latest column sums up some important but often-overlooked strategies regarding IT security :

• Add an encrypted password database
  
• Use digital IDs to authenticate and encrypt
  
• Encrypt mailbox access

Finally, consider using Groove, a collaborative tool whose value as a pure security solution is often overlooked. The preview edition is free and will encrypt all of your messages and documents, both on disk and on the wire, without requiring any PKI or S/MIME or SSL gymnastics.

Ray Ozzie : A number of people at Groove have started blogs, and I'm really trying to encourage more to do the same.  The more we live it, the more that we'll learn from it, and the more that we'll learn through it as we're engaged in conversations with our customers.  And thus, the sooner that we'll be able to improve our products and services based upon what we learn.  Of course, there are many questions that arise when an employer encourages employees to operate more "in the open", and so our counsel, Jeff Seul, has taken a first pass at creating a "blog policy".  Check it out.

Stephen Dulaney reflects on the Groove-Radio experiment that took place in june.

Groove programming tip of the day from Paresh Suthar : Hold a strong reference to the tool and/or telespace, not just the data model delegate(DMD)

Phil Wainewright : To complete the circle, we have to make sure users understand the limitations of security systems, otherwise they will become too complacent about safeguarding their digital identity, and then we'd be back to square one. The objective should not be to build complacency-immune products, but to nurture complacency-immune users — people who, to quote the title of former Intel CEO Andy Grove's autobiography, recognize that Only The Paranoid Survive.

Volker Weber points to a known but important issue regarding Groove's rolebased security model : 

If you share a Groove space with a number of people, you can assign roles to them. They can be either manager, participant or guest. You can now define which permissions those roles have, both at the space or the individual tool level. Now let's assume you have one tool that contains data, which only managers are supposed to see, and you assign read permission only to managers. Participants and guests can see this tool tab but not the data in it. Everything is fine so far, although I would prefer to hide the tool completely. Now, here is the problem: If a participant duplicates the space he will automatically be manager of the duplicate and see all the data in the managers only tool. How bad is that?

Ray Ozzie sheds some light on this issue on his weblog :

Empirically our user interface hasn't helped the user to understand the difference between "tool access" and "data access", e.g. here's someone currently struggling with this issue - who thought that disabling the tool's UI also removed the data from his computer while it was disabled. That if you can't see it, it must not be there. And his point is very well taken: it's not his fault that our UI didn't make it clear that just the tool's UI was being disabled. We'll clearly be revisiting the Permissions user interface design in the next major release of the product. And in an effort to help people to understand the issue, we've updated the product's Web-based documentation, the release notes, the knowledge base, etc.

Ashok Hingorani suggests, in my opinion, the most logical solution on the Grooveforums :

why not simply add this one more critical permisssion and the manager can decide whether space duplicates can be made at all. that way it is win win for all, the bug becomes a feature :)

Michael Herman : We're currently hard at work on the "groovy" features in Parallelspace eMail 2.0 that Groove Networks and others has been hounding us about for almost a year. eMail 2.0's personal synchronization features are easy to use (as easy as "File Save As"), extremely fast and can save any type of Outlook item to any Groove tool in any shared space (as long as it makes sense) - right from within Groove Workspace. It's pretty neat to see people's reactions to our early 2.0 builds.

Michael Helfrich on the swarming organization

Let's also recognize that what I'm suggesting here requires a serious shift in organizational thinking. It begs for people in the enterprise to embrace disruptive innovations as part of their IT strategies. One must admit that to a large degree, we have moved our strategies back into the glass house. What I suggest is a massive shift away from deterministic, structured, permission-based interaction. An even bigger hurdle is the one we faces as managers: Can we embrace human chaos with as much zeal as we embrace order?

Ray Ozzie : Lotus Notes customers and partners, please read this clarification regarding Notes & Groove integration.  Over the past week, I've been inundated with eMail from Notes customers and partners who are clearly feeling some pain, in search of answers, and wondering if Groove can play a role.

Network World Fusion : Groove hooks up with cousin Notes

"We integrate Groove's very 'tactical' collaborative spaces with a traditional center-based repository for all the reasons you'd expect - the ability to index, reuse, archive and back up," says John Olson, a director for BAE Systems, which develops systems for defense contractors. "Integration with data repositories is almost always part of enterprise-level projects with Groove."

Paresh Suthar added a category to his weblog with Groove programming tips and tricks.

Internetweek :  Notes users get into a collaborative Groove

The Notes integration is an extension of Groove's support for Microsoft Outlook clients; with connections to both clients, Groove has addressed virtually the entire e-mail base in corporate America.

Internetnews.com : Groove's double play

Groove Networks Announces Add-In Toolkit For Microsoft Visual Studio .NET That Enhances Developer Productivity

Groove 2.1 officially released

Phil Stanhope is starting a weblog too :-) Phil is a well respected Groove developer and the author of the excellent book: Get into the Groove. He visited me in Rotterdam 2 times this year and i'm looking forward to our next meeting.

Red Herring : On the edge

The competition between companies selling edge applications and Web services will be fierce. With such a large market in the making, three startups, Talaris, Groove Networks, and Mirror Worlds Technologies, could soon find themselves toe-to-toe with a heavyweight like Microsoft. The contest to create a widely used application, like the word processor in the '80s or the Web browser in the '90s, will further shift computing away from the desktop and central server; this will spark a fresh round of technology innovation. And as these startups race to fulfill their potential, VCs and corporations might start to take an interest in them.

E-Promag.com : Lotus Not Worried that Groove Is Getting Comfortable with Microsoft (via Vowe)

CRN : System Integrators Aplaud New Groove Workspace 2.1 Release

The announcement by Groove of a Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET will likely spark a wave of new Web services applications that can be integrated easily with Groove Workspace. Integrators said the new capabilities, and the pace of development by the Groove development team, led by Lotus Notes inventor and Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie, is impressive.

MediaTeam 1.1 for Groove from Symbiant Group is now available. MediaTeam allows Groove users to collaboratively review digital media, such as Windows Media files, MP3s, or even streaming media. MediaTeam 1.1 is perfect for online learning, reviewing marketing or training material, or to just share ideas that are best conveyed in video or audio format.

Infoworld : Groove adds Notes to dancecard

CNET : Groove software to jive with Lotus Notes (via Paresh Suthar)

Volker Weber explains how to uninstall Groovetools :

It is not enabled by default. First you need to import this registry setting:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Groove Networks, Inc.\Groove\Development]
"AllowToolDescriptorDeletion"="1"

Then go into any space, switch to the Add Tool tab, select the tool you wish to delete and hit Ctrl-Del. Bingo.

update: Paresh Suthar adds :

Just be careful with this setting because it is a sledgehammer and will remove the tool from the manifest AND the account - regardless of how many spaces that may already have instances of the tool in it.  This technique is primarily meant for Groove tool developers.

Ray Ozzie reflects on his 14 days of public blogging :

I've experienced enough to have become convinced that a witch's brew of revolutionary personal communications tools - IM, Groove and Weblogs - and their evolutionary mutations and outgrowths, collectively represent the "post-eMail" world .. a world in which we will all live, sooner or later. Private, public, and somewhere in-between.

Loosely Coupled Weblog : The latest recruit to corporate blogging is Groove Networks, whose founder and CEO Ray Ozzie attracted immediate attention when he launched a new weblog at the end of last month. The company's website now features a page listing all the blogs kept by its key staff, as well as independent blogs that write about Groove. That's a big step further forward than Macromedia, but why stop there? Aggregation is the name of the game, if you ask me. That page would be a whole lot more valuable if it showed the most recent headlines or first paras from those blogs, and doubly so if it offered an RSS feed of the aggregated links.

News.com features an article by Ray Ozzie called The myth of cybersecurity

Someday, some shareholder is going to lose quite a bit of money because an electronic message was "sniffed," or "spoofed." Someone's health or financial records are going to get into the wrong hands. A design will be compromised; someone will get hurt.  And at that point, network television cameras are going to be focused on a lawyer who's asking a company executive, or a government official, "Sir, were there reasonable alternatives at the time?"

Ray also adds some worthwhile comments on this issue on his weblog.

Matt Mower contacted me today via Groove and i showed him around in a Groovespace. He would like to see a Mac version, just like myself and lots of other Grooveusers. Personally i need to collaborate with a number of professionals (graphic designers, Architects, etc) and individuals who are using Macs only and Groove would be such a natural fit for these small, creative, adhoc workgroups. In my opinion this is one of the major factors preventing widespread, grassroots adaptation of Groove at this moment. Ray Ozzie wrote on his weblog a few days ago :

Regarding the Mac, two factoids - take them for what you will: a) the top personal request on the Groove website is currently "when will there be a Mac version?", and b) no major enterprise customer has yet asked to purchase a Mac version.  Quite perplexed.

I can only hope that major customer comes along very soon. cause i yearn for a 17" iMac with OSX and Groove ;-)

I just upgraded my laptop account to Groove 2.1. Had to reboot twice and also followed on Ray's tip defragmenting my disk after installing. Everything seems to be working allright now and i'm experiencing some notable performance gains especcially switching between tabs and spaces. For an overview of the features of 2.1 check out this PDF

Infoworld interview :  Jeff Raikes outlines the future of office

One of the things I love about what Ray figured out there is that he was able, at least initially, to avoid corporate IT being a gatekeeper that would prevent Notes from catching on. Notes got a grassroots sort of momentum. Groove, I think, gets a grassroots sort of momentum, but they're very cognizant of the importance of working closely with corporate IT. But clearly Ozzie has that model in mind where there's peer-to-peer capabilities that can evolve into server capabilities.

Rainer Volz : I admit that for some time the product strategy of Groove Networks was unclear to me, as expressed in this previous article. They had some success pushing Groove out to individuals "at the edge", then it seemed that they changed course to focus solely on enterprise customers. Knowledgeable people then explained to me that my interpretation was wrong.

During the last couple of months lots of Groovers discovered Blogs. Personally it was Hugh Pyle that inspired me to start a weblog. At this moment it's nice to see that more Bloggers like Matt Mower and Russell Beattie are getting into the Groove. This is getting more interesting everyday.

Dan Gillmor : Many of Groove's customers like the control-freak stuff. Corporations want to lock down their PCs in some ways, and Microsoft will be helpful to them in this effort. It may also be simpler, and more cost effective for Groove as a company, to turn the product into nothing more than an admittedly dynamite feature of Windows. It's not, I believe, in the ultimate interest of Groove's users -- not all of them, at any rate.

A list of Groove related weblogs has been added to the official Groovesite :-)

Ray Ozzie : By keeping the documents inside "zones of confidentiality" the whole time - without the user having to take extra steps to keep them secure - the Groove+STS solution satisfies my requirements of being immune to user complacency.

Steve Gillmor has started a radio weblog.

Ed Scannel at Infoworld: Office bets on XML odds

"I think it is very important that we think of what we do in the Office world as a smart client for plugging into SharePoint Team Services," Raikes said. "That is an environment that can be extended by Groove for new software services for things like notification services now, or in the Office 11 timeframe, for things like research services."

Lots of good stuff on Ray Ozzie's weblog this weekend 

Jon Udell's latest column : Putting people first

Microsoft sank $51 million into Groove Networks and began using the word "collaboration" more prominently in PowerPoint slides. The results so far are entirely attributable to Groove, which delivered shared editing of Office documents in version 2.0 of its transceiver and more recently enabled two-way synchronization between Sharepoint sites and Groove shared spaces.

Steve Gillmor : With Notes essentially cloned and the original Ozzie team resurfaced at Groove Networks, Microsoft shifted its attention to XML Web Services. With Microsoft's investment in Groove, collaboration R&D is now focused on the intersection of Groove's decentralized peer-to-peer model and Microsoft's centralized STS (SharePoint Team Services).

Greg Reinacker gets into the Groove :

It was Sam's post that made me start looking into Groove.  From reading other earlier posts about it, I just didn't get it.  Well, this morning I spent a half hour or so on Groove's web site, and I still didn't get it.  If I hadn't heard so much hype on the blogs about it, I would have quit right there. So then I download and install Groove, and start playing with it.  After 15 or 20 minutes of this, I'm starting to get it, so I think.  I call a few people from a client's office and get them to install it, and we start exploring what we can do.  By now, I'm getting excited about what I can do with this, and I'm starting to think I get it.  We figure out a couple of quick wins, and share a "pilot" groove space out to the team.

John Burkhardt responds to Sam's observations:

Tools like Groove and Radio represent a paradigm shift.  They create interpersonal connections and share information in rich and meaningful ways.  After my first few weeks at Groove I was convinced that it would be all that people would do with their computer.  Many users now say that Groove is always running.. it's becoming part of their primary use of their PC.  But it will take a long time for the masses to discover, because its not enough to just get the software and look at the screen shots.  You have to start experiencing it with other people in a meaningful context and making those connections before you start having those "Bing!" moments go off in your own head.

Sam Gentile describes a scene that sounds very familiar to me. 

 I had Groove running on my notebook and I brought it up a few times to do things. I collaborate with some clients and people with Groove, keeping documents and discussions in sync. I also use it as a better Briefcase. And invariably, the comments were like "Wow, that's cool! I could manage my distributed project that way. I could keep track of bugs across a geographically disperse team that way. And man, you're disconnected and can sync later?" Then all of them would say "Who's Groove?" Its interesting to note that people need this kind of stuff and they have no idea its even out there or who Groove is (none of the developers in the room had ever heard of them).

A Groove performance tip from Ray.

From the Grooveforums :

Q :  What's the status of Groove on the upcoming (Nov 7) sales of Microsoft Tablet PC ? Will that be a seperate version of Groove, different licensing, etc ?

A : There will not be a special version of Groove that works only on the Tablet PC. Groove is working with Microsoft on TabletPC technology, and over time ink will become a native data type throughout the Groove application environment (at least wherever it makes sense). Groove has not yet announced dates on when that will be available.

An interesting discussion on the Grooveforums about the question if Groove can be blocked completely.  Phil Stanhope responds :

The real question remains: Why are the employees of your firm seeking to improve communications with external business partners? 
If you believe that this is, not in fact the use case in your firm, then you've got a signicantly more difficult problem. Any technology that can be used easily and is readily available threatens your corporate integrity: telephone, fax, WiFi, HTTP POST, WebDAV, CDRW, 1394, USB, Serial and Parallel ports, printers, copy machines, and scanners to name a few. Then there's the plain old analog p2p (people-to-people) problem.

Ray Ozzie : Personal technology - that is, technology that empowers from the bottom-up, can yield immediate and direct local value, and effects grass-roots transformation.  Think 1-2-3, not ERP.  Think pairware or peerware, not groupware.

Jon Udell reacts on Ray Ozzie

These are all the right questions. To answer them, I think we have to do the experiment. When some of us tried one recently, it was illuminating all around, for Groovers and for bloggers. Effective communication always has required the ability to compartmentalize, to empathize with and belong to different groups, to manage multiple layers of meaning, to project a range of identities. Now that we have so many modes of communication to choose from, balancing the interplay of public and private modes has gotten trickier. For what it's worth, my gut tells me that we need to have a set of flexible frameworks in place, to get people using them in a variety of boundary-crossing scenarios, and then to adapt the technology as needs and opportunities arise.

Because of Jon's post I’m receiving some requests from people who want to join this Groovespace but it doesn't exist anymore. However the transcripts of the discussion in that space are published here, archived for future reference.
This experiment was a temporarily event, a kind of spontaneous online conference, where a group of people with similar interests gathered together in the same place for a couple of days exchanging ideas and getting to know each other a bit on a more personal level. I feel that Groove is the next best thing to meeting in real life for building relationships and a high traffic Groovespace , like this one, can be a very direct, intensive and sometimes even exhausting environment and in this case, like a real life event, shouldn't last too long. I'm glad i've had this experience and this is surely something to repeat. I've got to know interesting new people and it offered me a lot of food for thought on the boundaries between public and private discussion and how to balance them to create a fruitful environment for collaboration.

Ray Ozzie : It has been my goal to explore what lies at the intersection between people, organizations, and technology. To attempt to utilize technology - to mold it, to shape it into a form such that it can help organizations to achieve a greater "return on connection" from employee, customer, and partner relationships, and to help individuals to strengthen the bonds between themselves and those with whom they interact - online.

ZDNet : Microsoft-Groove: Team-building exercise

Hurwitz Group believes that the integrations of these platforms will increase not only online collaboration, but also offline collaboration in a multi-faceted team environment.

GrooversBrasil's Radio Weblog is a new weblog providing news on Groove for Brasil and other portugese speaking countries. Nice detail: It's maintained from a Groovespace probably using one of our experimental tools that Tim created. A beta of this Groove/Radiotool can be injected using this link (install at your own risk).

Dave Winer : The connection between private and public spaces is hot again. Jon Udell is discussing it on his weblog, answering a question from Groove's Ray Ozzie, posted on his weblog.

Infoworld : Office gets its XML Groove

As Microsoft drives XML into the core of its client software stack, Groove Networks is set to unveil a new toolkit designed to extend the collaborative capabilities of Windows applications.

Very worthreading Infoworld analysis how changes in Microsoft's products and strategies will affect customers and competitors. 

Microsoft's romance with Groove excludes other players in the peer collaboration space.

Computerworld : Microsoft, Groove Plan to Integrate Apps.

SharePoint product manager Trina Seinfeld said many groups within Microsoft are talking to Groove about its software. "I think you'll see more and more ways we're working together with Groove," she said.

Stephen Dulaney thinks nobody reads his weblog. I, for one, am a loyal reader and i can hardly imagine i'm the only one regularly reading his thoughts on social networks, Groove and blogging. I've just have been a little hesitant to quote him because i assumed he liked the idea of blogging alone ;-)
Amongst other things he's been proposing the concept of a Radio/Groove offramp that he would like to see:

I wish there was a way to use radio but keep some of the things private like in groove. I like the journal aspect that weblogs are like groove workspaces with a time stamp but there are some things that I need to find a place to log but I don't want to be shared so publicly. I liken groove to sharing secrets. I started the weblog to explain social capital in the blogspace as a result of what I saw when Dave was absent for health reasons. Then just Monday I had my own minor scare and now need a place to log some health numbers but don't want them on the blog. However the process of loging using Radio feels like the easiest path except for the problem that I can't controll the members of the shared space. There is some sweet spot between groove and radio that is just on the tip of reality. It depends on how granular the controls could be for sharing secrets. The onramp idea may need to be explored as an offramp from radio to groove.

During the last months Tim and I have been working on some experiments on how to connect Radio and Groove, mainly focussing on using Radio's publishing power to provide a particular space with a (partial) content publisher. However the proposed Radio offramp shouldn't be so hard to create, Tim and Hugh allready proved that, and with the upcoming release of Groove's Edge Services things are getting even easier.  This is something to discuss with Tim when he returns from his well deserved vacation in Espagna. 

Ray Ozzie : I'm pondering what it will mean if I begin to post my thoughts here in public, as opposed to using Groove-internal blogs/sts/notes/groove spaces.  Forcing myself to partition internal vs. external on a daily basis would truly be a mindset change...

John Burkhardt reports the availability of the Beta version of Team Direction's project management tool for Groove 2.0.  I just injected it and it looks very nice, smooth install and slick, drag and drop, interface and office integration. This is definitely a worthy alternative for the default Projectmanager tool !!