For Forrest : Running Groove on a Gamesconsole seems to be one step closer now they got Win2K running on the Xbox. Personally i would love to see if it's possible to have a similar lowcost networked device running without any visible OS but Groove only ;-)

Sam Gentile asks : Does anyone know how to change the defaults in GPT - The Groove Project Tool, such that I can enter a task date on a Saturday or Sunday?

I don't think you can change this (anyone correct me if i'm wrong) but if you're looking for a good Groove projectplanner, i can advise you to take a look at Team Direction Project 1.0. We're currently are using the beta of this tool and i think it's the best projectplanner around for Groove at this moment. I'm looking forward to the upcoming release because i saw some nifty enhancements last week.
btw: i checked if this tool also had the weekend issue and it turns out that they don't want you to work in the weekend too. I think the're trying to tell us something ;-)

Tim upgraded the Groove Bloggertool to version 2. Simple collaborative blogging from a Groovespace using a (free) Blogger account. Have fun.....

Ashok Hingorani blogs his impressions of last week's Partner Briefing at Groove HQ.

Darwin Magazine : Knowing the difference

A product constraint can be determined by process of elimination: If you are taking care of your customers and are reaching the best customer segments with the right message, then you have a product constraint. KM tools for attacking this primarily involve those that assist R&D. The best of these are research collaboration and rapid prototyping tools, such as SolidWorks (3D modeling and collaboration), Triz (idea generation) and Groove (collaboration). These tools facilitate rapid prototyping, idea generation and idea sharing, and have been shown to create dramatic improvement in a company's innovation rate when the organizational structure for supporting these tools has been carefully designed.

A couple of new articles on the Tablet PC. Last week in Boston  i had a chance to check out a tablet PC in reallife for the first time and what i saw was very impressive. Personally  i'm very interested to see if this is a suitable replacement for my old Vaio but from a business point of view i see a lot of potential for solving problems in vertical scenario's for the Medical or Construction industry to name a few.

Think of walking on a constructionsite, having all CADdrawings available offline, to view and to make notes and remarks on these files by drawing directly on your screen, later when you get back online, all this data is being synchronized for the other members of that shared space following the OHIO principle (Only Handle Information Once) This behaviour resembles and leverages the day to day practice of the constructionsite where people still prefer to draw on paper. A combination of Groove and the Tablet PC might offer the first real viable alternative for some old analogue business routines.

Made it back to Rotterdam in one piece. Feels good to be home again. Filled with a lot of good memories and groovy ideas, I'm ready to do some serious work and Wolf now seems to be very interested in a future quarterback position for the New England Patriots ;-) btw: Congratulations to Stephen Dulaney !!

Paresh Suthar : I use Groove as my IM application, and I get a private implementation of all of the above as a result.  I really want interopability for other IM applications, but I hope that Groove won't have to "dumb down" the data to achieve this.  Until then, I will have to look at running Groove and other IM applications for interopability.

SB Chatterjee : On Friday (09/20/02), I spent a few hours with the Groove Developers/Partners at their meeting at Groove HQ in Beverly, MA. It was most interesting to finally meet people you have been communicating and collaborating with in Groove spaces for over the past year. I got to meet Phil Stanhope and Hugh Pyle - two of the core developers who work for Groove. Amongst others, were the independent developers from the world over - UK, Netherlands, India, Canada and USA. A talented bunch of people who remind me of my time at the IBM Watson Research Labs back in the mid-90's.

Ray Ozzie : Given the level of interest, I thought that I'd share with you a document, entitled "Software Platform Dynamics", that I've used in the past to help associates get up to speed with the nature of the software platform business. It's a fairly dense collection of thoughts gathered over many years; I hope that it serves to further the discussion...

An interview with Ray Ozzie in eWeek : Building a better Groove

I'm about to leave New England and fly back to Rotterdam to see Machteld and Wolf again :-) I really had a great week but i'm feeling a bit homesick everytime i open my laptop and see my desktop wallpaper. If anyone is interested to see what Groove's offices, employees and partners look like, check out some snapshots i made during this last week.

This has been a very exciting but also exhausting week. I'm glad i had a chance to showcase some of our products and meet the faces behind so many names. It was very good to be able to discuss in length some hot issues with the crew who is responsible for the development and support of Groove and i think all of us got the distinct feeling that our issues are taken serious. Tnx Groove for making this happen :-)
Today I’m sitting at Phil's barn, digesting all the info of the last days and trying to recover from 5 nights of serious drinking and socializing. I will probably put some pictures up later today but first I’m off to the beach with the dogs to enjoy the beautiful weather here in New England.

Ray Ozzie : My mind has been completely wrapped around exciting continued developments on the customer side - Groove is being applied to some incredible and unexpected uses - and cool new developments on the product side - both in terms of seeing things that I didn't even know that the product was capable of, and also in terms of innovative product evolution.

We're almost at the end of the presentations of the first day of the Groove partner briefing. At this moment we're listening to Matt Pope who's talking about the Groove webservices, formerly called Groove Edge services. After Matt's presentation we're off for cocktails and dinner. We've been receiving a ton of information today and tomorrow there will even be more presentations. Most of it falls under the NDA so i'm not able to publish it on this blog but i can say it all looks very promising. It's obvious Groove has been putting a lot of effort in this event not only providing us with good food and drinks but having many key persons within Groove witnessing the presentations and being available to answer the questions raised by the partners. especially Ashok is making good use of this opportunity ;-)

Win a laptop or camcorder in the Groove Networking Contest

Alexis Smirnov : Longhorn vs. Groove Platform, Next Office vs. Groove Desktop.

I'm now blogging from inside the Groove HQ. It's a wonderful place both for the architecture and the people who work there. I've finally met with Terri Martel, Joanne Maher, John Giudice, Jack Ozzie, Paresh Suthar and a lot more. Tonight all the Groove partners will meet at the Rocky Neck in Gloucester to enjoy some fresh caught lobster and cold beer.

Kevin Werbach : Jeremy Allaire ruminates about metaphors for social computing.  He's on the right track.  Jeremy's thoughts about how Flash Communications Server could be used are strikingly similar to some of the concepts Ray Ozzie has expressed in connection with Groove.  Not that they aren't original, or that Macromedia and Groove are doing the same thing.  There's a deeper trend here.  Whether you come from visual creativity tools or document-centered collaboration, you quickly realize that the next big thing is what I'm provisionally calling collaborative work (until I find a better term).

In a few hours i'm off to Boston to visit Groove HQ  :-)

Lots of talk on FlashMX these days. Timothy Appnel is asking if Flash is the Internet Application Runtime that enables a new breed of lightweight  browserbased applications, Kevin Werbach is looking for examples of compelling applications and Macromedia's CTO Jeremie Allaire is pointing to some very interesting examples of Rich UI flash applications.

We have recently put two of our flashbased 2D/3D designtools online, a Volumeplanner and a Floorplanner. Both tools are part of our Architect0r series. A set of tools based on Flash, XML and VRML (Cortona VRML plugin needed) that can be delivered through the browser or in a Groovetool.

     

Our company, Suite75, has been focussing on creating userfriendly designtools for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry and over the years we are turning more and more to Flash as our main development environment. Our goal is to build very easy tools that enable consumers to design/customize their closets or bathrooms, Renters to plan officespace online or (future) buildingowners to design a modular building based on a prefab system. Flash is a very powerful tool to build rich user interfaces that  can be delivered through the browser. However what i really find most interesting is that we're using these tools as a kind of rich XML editor, to create and edit data in a visually compelling way. The XML-output can be used and reused in a lot of different ways for instance to view as a 3D model in VRML or X3D or to generate a list of materials or a preliminary pricequote. 

While Flash is an extremely powerful environment to build and deliver lightweight and userfriendly interfaces,we also became aware that the way this information is being processed and communicated to and within a company is crucial for succesful adoptation of these kind of tools. It's good to see that with the release of Flash MX it is becoming easier to build enhanced functionality like saving and sharing designs or to quickly chat about them with a salesperson or designer but when you try to build all this functionality into one tool you risk the chance it's getting less lightweight to build and deliver and a lot more difficult for users to operate. 

That's where Groove kicks in. A customer can start by surfing to a website where he can use a rich flashbased tool to customize a design and when he decides to order or ask for a pricequote, he can choose take all this data easy into a secure Groovespace.  By clicking on a button a dedicated Groovespace is being created and a salesperson/advisor of the company is notified and invited automatically to this space. In there, they can guide the customer smoothly through the process. Groove offers a very intimate and rich environment to communicate and quickly build an understanding relationship. 

Wrapping them in a Groovetool adds easy realtime collaborative designing and viewing to these normally standalone designtools and next to that, all data is be securely stored within a Groovespace without the need of a server. The consitent XML data of the design can be (re)used or exported to DWG/DXF/SVG or VRML by a variety of other Groovetools like our CADViewer, that can easily be added or deleted from the space if needed.

Our Architect0rtool for Groove is a demo to showcase the capabilities of these kind of tools and has been freely available since the launch of Groove 2.0. If you haven't tried it out yet , take it for a spin and let us know what you think of it.

Another German Groovesite popped up : www.mygroove.de by Frank Arndt (link via GrooversBrasil)

Alexis Smirnov : Groove is of course a good example of a successful application that will greatly benefit from unified IM. But inversely, if Groove fails, no one can blame the failure on the fact that IM world isn't unified.

Carlos Araujo points to a new Groove related weblog by esb_us, well known from the Grooveforums, Welcome !

On this day of reflection, a personal sparkle of light : one year ago my son, that is now sitting on my lap, was conceived.

Internetweek publishes the results of a recently held poll on collaboration :

Most companies think they need a combination of tools -- e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration platforms -- in order to perform critical collaboration functions such as document sharing, revision control, and discussions. That's not necessarily a big knock on existing collaboration platforms -- such as that of Groove Networks, however -- since a large number of companies think such platforms are also enough. Plus, companies are used to mixing and matching software systems as needed to satisfy their business requirements.

Paresh Suthar : Recommended reading:  Groove Security Architecture white paper.  I believe that one of the more impressive accomplishments of the Groove architects is the security model - transparent, always on, encrypted on disk and over the wire.  This white paper explains the security model in detail for accounts, identities, contacts, spaces, tools and messaging protocols.

InfoWorld : IM Planet: Presence pitched as killer corporate app

Despite the noise generated around competing architectures, Microsoft, Lotus, and Groove Networks agree that when it comes to enterprise instant messaging, presence awareness is the true "killer app" and that interoperability is a key challenge facing the industry going forward.

Groove Smooths Connections - This eWeek article describes features that are planned for the v2.5 release of Groove. (via Paresh Suthar)

Ray Ozzie : Tyranny, Terror and Technology , Some thoughts about the intersection between the challenges confronting business, and those confronting government and society.

Mr Bunny : Here is the first attempt with the Groove SpacePublisher from Suite75 - Title. This is from the Notepad Tool. My content is not very exciting but I'll look at this a bit more over the next few days. A great way to accellerate Groove reach to lo-fi users.

Google dug up some interesting stuff : Slipping in cross-platform support in the backdoor  at Way.Nu, a weblog by Jonathan Peterson, that i never visited before. Amongst other things he's wondering if edge services will deliver some much needed cross-platform functionality.

Ray seems smart enough to realize that in the real world, a collaboration tool that doesn't bring all virtual team members to the table isn't a solution. The new product launch team wouldn't be able to share marketing materials with the Mac-based ad agency or requirements documents with the Linux types in the web development professional services partner. Without that, we're back to Notes; a really nice Swiss Army knife, but one that can only drive Torx ® screws.

The good news is that Groove isn't waiting for people to convert or even for Microsoft to create the .NET conversion kit. They created SOAP access to Groove and made it publicly available. At this point, Ray is saying all the right things; balancing the power a native application with the expandability of an open application. The only question is will Groove continue to support this little backdoor and the 3-man team that is responsible for keeping it open and will someone out there create Linux and Mac tools that can take advantage of it?

It's good rerereading the links he provides and nice to see he mentions some of our experiments we (mainly Tim) have been doing. I hope i can have a chat with John and Matt next week in Boston to find out the current status of Edge Services. Can i buy you guys a beer  ;-)

InfoWorld : Controlling Media

As Microsoft's .Net vision moves closer to reality, it's easy to imagine synergies with Office documents and SharePoint Team Services, not to mention peer-to-peer collaborative scenarios involving Groove Networks' Groove.

Fluffy Bunny wonders about the status of the Bloggertool for Groove. It's true the current link is a dead one this is because the content of Tim's weblog was lost during a nasty harddisk crash. At this moment there are 2 experimental Blogging tools for Groove available both created by Tim. One tool that uses the Blogger API to post to a Blogger account and one that make use of Radio to publish the (partial) content of a Groovespace to a Radio weblog. To install the Bloggertool click here and to install the Spacepublisher-tool click here. Have fun with it but beware inject these tools at your own risk.

Michael Helfrich : Let's face it, we all run our businesses through many, many project teams doing their stuff and praying that it all comes together. MS Project is the killer application for the structured aspects, but collaborative frameworks like Groove provide the best chance at managing the unanticipated exception conditions. Fusing the two environments together provides perhaps yet another killer app for the enterprise.

Ray Ozzie : The browser has served us well.  It has provided a means by which we can have universal access to applications, transactions, and published information.  But in the meantime, the PC has become a powerhouse: cpu, gpu, storage, price.  The Great Conversion to notebook computers is well under way, and it's now clear that the most wildly successful wireless mobile productivity device won't be the 3G phone, or even the BlackBerry, but the ubiquitous and inexpensive WiFi notebook.  In a shape and size to suit every need.

And another Radio blog with lots of Groove related postings is from the mysterious Fluffy Bunny :-)

Alexis Smirnov switched from a Blogger account to a Radio Blog. I'm subscribed. Today he writes:

Let’s see if I can get it straight. First of all, there’s Groove Platform. 3rd parties can develop applications on it using OEM Kit. Then, there’s Groove Workspace. It is an application that runs on top of Groove Platform, but also allows 3rd parties to extend it by writing Groove Workspace Tools.

The best analogy I can find is Windows and Office. Windows is a platform. Office is a Windows application, but you can also extend it by writing Office plug-ins and marcos.

Ok, this sounds very very reasonable and healthy. So what’s wrong with Groove’s picture? The priority. Clearly, Groove has made a conscious decision to invest much more in support for developers of Groove Workspace Tools while providing a bare minimum support for Groove Platform developers. Imagine if 95% of MSDN was allocated for information on how to develop Office plug-ins and 5% was given to help out Windows application developers. And you had to "negotiate" with Microsoft to get that 5%!

Interesting to see that WareSource, a company specialized in trainingcourses and support applications for the Lotus Notes/Domino community is using Groove as a live online support tool

Ray Ozzie responds directly to Joel's remarks in a long and well written piece that offers a lot of insights in Groove's strategy.  A mustread for everyone who is interested in Groove.

It's a different world now, and Groove's platform potential is far beyond that that could have been envisioned in the mid 80's. Afforded the opportunity to do so, it is surely our intent to create even more value through Groove - for our customers, for our ecosystem, and for our investors. I don't know if you view us as greedy, or clueless, or taking inept actions to choke off our own oxygen, but I can tell you for certain that we're trying our best to concurrently create a platform and an ecosystem around that platform, and to create direct application value for our customers, consistent with our ability to invest in the business and our knowledge and experience in this business.

Steve Gillmor : Notes postmortem

Ozzie, like any responsible parent, is speaking to the concerns of Notes developers. Increasingly, Groove is providing the constituent pieces to make a rapid transition to the .Net infrastructure: harnessing Visual Studio as the development tool, using the Compact Framework to speed porting to wireless devices, adding an Edge server to allow componentization of Groove's peer services, and most strategically, adding doclink infrastructure to allow porting of Notes application constructs to Groove and Office.Next.

PopG 2.1, a remote client solution for Groove, is available now. PopG uses the Citrixclient that makes it possible to access your Groovedata from a Apple or Linux system or just to check your spaces from an internetcafe when you're on holiday. The basic tariff for PopG Remote Groove Desktops is 15$ a month.

Another German Groove article in WebWelt 

Network World Fusion : Beating the drum

The Telework Consortium plans to open its Telework Laboratory in Herndon, Va., this September.  The group believes that ultimately, full-motion video powered by ultra broadband connections is the future of telework. Plenty of people with deep pockets buy into the group's vision. The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Small Business Administration each awarded the Consortium $2.4 million and $1 million respectively. It's also signed on seven big name "technology partners": Nortel, AgilQuest, Microsoft, 3M, Groove Networks, Alloptic and Optical Solutions.

Ashok links to the index of the upcoming eBook : Enterprise Groove, A roadmap to succsesful use

Joel Spolsky's worthreading essay on platforms generated a lot of discussion during the weekend. I'm still reading and digesting all of it. Some interesting threads on Joel's forum discussing the essay. On their weblogs Brian Jepson, Justin Rudd and Krzysztof Kowalczyk agree with Joel and are expressing strong doubts regarding Groove's strategy. Dave Winer points to an essay from 1996 explaining why Groove can't bet exclusively on being a platform and Alexis Smirnov writes :

So do I think Joel's article is wrong? No, it simply fails to capture the real issue with Groove - there are two different views of "Groove Platform". One is being offered by Groove Inc. and another is wanted by ISVs. Groove Inc. defines the platform as Runtime plus Transceiver. Want to build on the Groove Platform - write a Groove Tool. Most ISVs define the platform as Runtime. Period. Most of the people thinking of integrating Groove's collaboration capabilities only want the Runtime. This is why Joel's analysis of cost/benefit of integrating Groove with CityDesk is right on the money - it illustrates the Groove/ISV gap.

Ashok Hingorani : A day in the life of Ivan Groover