Ouch, I'm having a bad Groove day. I wanted to spice up the performance of my Grooveaccounts in which i did way to much betatesting of 3rd party tools (including ours) so i de-installed Groove, cleaned up and defragmented my harddisk and reinstalled the latest version. After that my Groove refused to start up again. :-(

I tried every trick i knew and even posted a cry for help on the Grooveforums but it looked like my accounts we're completely corrupted and i started thinking about some more drastic solutions that would cause me to loose my IM archive and some personal Groovespaces that i forgot to backup. In a final attempt to get my Groove working again i deleted my data folder, replaced it with a copy of the datafolder i luckily made about 10 days ago, fired up Groove again and it worked like nothing happened !!! All spaces and messages were synced and Groove runned fine again.

I use Groove now for almost 2 years and although i rarely make backups and mistreat my computer and Grooveaccount on a daily base, i haven't lost any data yet. Somehow Groove allways seems to heal itself like it did today. I don't know exactly how a 10 day old copy of my account instantly shows yesterday's IM's and spacechanges but you don't hear me complain :-))

Ray is back from Asia and blogs his first tech impressions.

The October edition of the monthly Groove bulletin is available

Groove just added a handy ROI Calculator (return-on-investment)  to their website so companies can get an idea of how much time and money they could be saving if they start communicating via Groove.

Steve Gillmor is quoting Groove's John Burkhardt in his latest Infoworld article.

Groove is being transformed by edge services. Microsoft is trying to figure out how to build massively scalable applications that they're going to run on these megaservers that can handle millions of clients hammering on this thing," Burkhardt says. With Groove, he says, "now you have your own little, personal SOAP server.

Congratulations to Peter Drayton 

We have been very busy these last couple of days with the Beta-release of our CADViewer for Groove. The CADViewer is the first product based on the Suite75 Shared Viewing Framework and offers real-time shared viewing of DWG/DXF files within a Groove Shared Space. This Framework is designed for a variety of viewers to be used within Groove. Any viewer based on this framework will have functionality like: 

• Fast and secure standalone or realtime shared file-viewing
  
• Auto discovery of all viewable files within a Groove Shared Space. 
  
• Save comments to a Discussion Tool
  
• Save current view to a Pictures Tool
  
• Save current view to a Sketchpad Tool
  
• Print the current view to any printer

In the near future we will release more commercial tools based on this framework to collaborative view and comment the majority 2D/3D CAD file-types and other commonly used non-CAD fileformats. If you're interested in taking the beta for a testdrive, please contact me and if you provide us with your feedback during the betaperiod you will receive one free copy the moment we release the official version :-)

St. Louis Dispatch : Program helps long-distance collaborators get in the Groove

Quirks and qualms aside, Groove Workspace works as advertised and provides an inexpensive, effective collaboration environment for everyone who needs to work close together, even when they are miles apart.  [via Paresh]

CRN : Groove 2.5 poised to take webservices plunge

A CNET perspective by Kevin Werbach : Tech's big challenge : Decentralization 

In the coming decade, decentralization will be the critical challenge for the technology, media and telecommunications industries. Each has developed with the assumption that powerful central forces will manage development. Enterprise IT has "big iron" servers and monolithic software applications; communications has carriers investing in huge infrastructure build-outs; and media has content owners controlling distributions channels.
These approaches are under siege--and not because there's a New Economy, or because information deserves to be free, or because of any fluctuation in the stock market. Centralized systems are failing for two simple reasons: They can't scale, and they don't reflect the real world of people.

Another plea for a native Grooveclient for Mac OS X this time from Brian Jepson.

Amar Patel is conducting an online survey to compare the use of Groove in a business environment against centralized collaboration tools such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook. It will only take you 2 minutes.....

A new weblog by Mitch Kapor, founder and former CEO of Lotus Development Corporation, member of the board of directors of Groove Networks and co-founder of the EFF  (check his bio for more info)

His weblog is part of the OSAF (Open Source Applications Foundation) that is developing a new PIM (Personal Information Manager) as an open source alternative to Outlook. The product is codenamed Chandler and is a "spiritual descendant" of Lotus Agenda. The list of features looks very promising including IM and Filesharing and i can't help wondering if, over time, Chandler will prove to be synergetic or competitive to Groove.

Ashok Hingorani : We promised some new tools and here they are - plus the emerging look and feel of the first GrooveClinic, in India. we have 20 people now available with a wide range of skills and some serious groove knowledge. Expect to hear more from this team as they get going.

Paresh Suthar : Groove's strength lies in the ability to take content from center based systems, to allow secure adhoc collaboration around the content and finally to publish content back to center based systems.  This is exactly why the demonstration/announcement of Groove's integration with Sharepoint Team Services has received such an amazing response.

Infoworld : Interwoven manages enterprise content

I think Groove has the slickest product I've seen in years. It's very cool. And the great thing about something like Groove is, out of the box Groove works with our product. So if you wanted to do the peer-to-peer sharing of assets today using Groove on Interwoven, there's no integration required, you just simply re-enable that.

Business 2.0 : Email Killer App or Business Killer ?

New distribution vehicles, from low-end mainstream tools like instant messaging to more elaborate systems like Groove, are attractive and at least as reliable as e-mail.

SB Chatterjee : Microsoft and Lotus shoot it out in the enterprise collaboration market. Microsoft has big plans for SharePoint - "The plan for SharePoint is that it will be incorporated ultimately into the Windows environment.” That should make the Groove integration with SharePoint much tighter.

By participant request, the KM Cluster uses Groove 2.1  for event collaboration, content management, information access and electronic community.

InformationWeek : Pfizer, Pharmacia Groove together

Groove's peer-to-peer architecture eliminates many of the headaches of setting up a secure, server-based collaboration application, so users don't have to worry about synchronizing data and checking documents in and out

Albany Area Advertiser : Managing Email Overload

SB Chatterjee : The distinction of being the first Groove ASP certainly goes to PopG. The vision of deploying Groove as an ASP-service is innovative thinking. Peer-to-peer with a thin-client is a strong contrast of ideas that opens up myriads of possibilities.

Nice to see some faces behind the names i've been meeting online these last 10 days in the Groove Experiments space. Kinda reminded me of the Mugshot discussion on the Grooveforums some time ago.

The discussion regarding Groove, initiated by Joel's platforms essay, continues on the forum.

John Burkhardt : Everyone is trying to build huge server farms to allow a web service to handle connection to millions of clients.  Groove Web Services is more like your virtual private server that allows you (or your applications) to participate in your Groove shared spaces.  It extends your Groove spaces to other computing environments or applications for you.  Of course, there is no reason that the "you" couldn't me an agent as well..

Michael Helfrich : Military-grade crypto at the app layer, riding on top of commodity, whatever-comms-are-available-to-me networks. Sounds like Groove.

Groove wins a Basex Excellence Award

Pulver 100 Companies to watch lists Groove Networks

From the Grooveforums : We have recently discovered that the first version of the Forms Tool may, in rare circumstances, lose data. If you currently use the Groove Forms tool, please take a look at this new technote, which details how to identify the version of your Forms Tool and move data if necessary. Please note that you may be using an earlier version of the Forms Tool, even if you have only used Groove Workspace 2.1

CBS News : Software we just love

We just love Groove Network. This online software allows coworkers to collaborate in virtual workspaces, to share contact information, calendars, files, even real-time chats over the internet. In fact, this very segment was put together using Groove Network's software. While I worked dayside in New York City, my producer - who works nights - was home in New Jersey. We both worked on the same documents at the same time, and compared notes. Great stuff.  [via Vowe]

Informationweek interviews Ray Ozzie as a sidebar to their main story on collaboration titled Come together 

Ozzie says collaboration needs to fit into the way people work -- and although today's workforce is increasingly mobile, it isn't always connected to the home office. That means process-oriented technologies are useful only some of the time. "During the Web era, everyone had this dreamy vision of people being connected all the time," he says. "People need to understand that companies that sell processes aren't addressing the way people work."

Hugh Pyle : Microsoft XDocs may look like FrontPage, but sounds really quite interesting: a proper schema-driven XML editing environment. Now, if that were the native format for Sharepoint, could be fun. Or plugged into a distributed XML environment?

Peter Drayton : If the experimentation with Groove/weblog integration helps us to more seamlessly transition from collaboration to communication and back again, it will advance the state of the discourse, which is goodness.

Computerworld : Power to the Grid

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures are also converging with the grid model. Although P2P has failed to gain enterprise momentum due to the greater perceived manageability and security of tightly coupled server-oriented systems, some P2P players such as Groove Networks are focusing on collaborative computing and communication (more akin to a data grid). Others, including Sun's JXTA, are trying to create building blocks to solve some of the classic grid problems, like authentication.

Interview with Ray Ozzie in Government Computer News

I’m a bit of a contrarian: I don’t believe we should be worrying so much about wireless network security. I believe we should be using software that automatically encrypts, whether it’s over the air or over a wired network. Just because something’s on the wire doesn’t mean it’s secure.  

SB Chatterjee : During the past few days, the Groove networks were slow - there is a barrage of end-user gripes in the Groove Forums. I am finally "synced" up - took awhile, over 48 hours ! I think *one* good way of dealing with this is by having a Groove Infrastructure status page that shows the health of the infrastructure.

Mmmmmm interesting, Groove partner Documentum buys Groove competitor eRoom.

Greg Reinacker and Sam Gentile would like to announce our creation of "Groove Experiments". We have been working and Groovin to flesh out some ideas. This dynamic shared Groovespace has three main purposes:

1.  Groove and Blogs. There are certain synergies between Groove spaces and weblogs. Let's enumerate and expand a bit on the possibilities. In particular, one great synergy, especially in the Web Services and .NET communities, is the initial posting of some technical idea or topic on a Blog and then wanting to get into a more "direct" and detailed discussion or interaction  about that. Groove is excellent for that immediete phase of fleshing out and discusing the idea(s). So the first main area and disussion is around providing the ability to have detailed disucssions about blog topics and explore the synergy further.
   
2. Groove and Web Services - We belive that there are some great ideas to be explored in this area. Lets get them on the table. Maybe have a groovespace aggregator that lets you see new entries for multiple groove spaces, so you can keep up with all the the activity for topics on your blog. There are also plenty of areas of dicussion on Web Services in general and where they should go.
   
3. Groove Platforn Applications - We believe that the value of Groove is not in the existing tools but in the underlying Platform and the decentralized peer-to-peer communications mechanism that can create some really interesting applications. Lets explore. [via Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

SB Chatterjee : If cross-border telespaces are a part of your business transactions - under which nation state's jurisdiction does a Groove Telespace lie ?

Ray Ozzie : Five years ago today was my first day working on Groove - an incredible journey, and yet it's only just begun....

Carlos Araujo alias GrooversBrasil stopped using Radio for his weblog and now uses our Bloggertool to edit his new Blog collaborative from a Groovespace.