Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog

January 31, 2003

New features in Groove 2.5

A comprehensive list of the new features in Groove 2.5 can be found here

January 30, 2003

Groove 2.5 is out

Paresh Suthar report the release of Groove 2.5 . Just upgraded my main acount and experienced no problems. Finally i can start playing around with some of the exiting stuff Tim has been working on using Groove Web Services.

January 29, 2003

Partying with J2EE, Webobjects and Groove

Neil Finlayson : So I want to use WebObjects to create dynamic, rich-HTML, database-driven email applications. Stand by. How all this relates to Groove will take me a while.

January 27, 2003

GXL Killer app?

Rick Lillie : Combine the power and versatility of the Groove workspace with Ashok's GXL (Excel spreadsheet) tool, and I truly believe we have what "you guys in the software industry" refer to as a "killer application."

Ashok's new baby: GXL

GXLtool by Computact The last couple of weeks i've been betatesting Ashok's new GXL tool that makes it possible to collaborate realtime on Excelsheets within a Groovespace. I must say i really like this tool and it's potential. Next to that it was very nice to see it grow from the early stages to the current stable version in a period of only 30 days.
Great work Ashok !!!

January 25, 2003

Peer Development and Parrallelspace partnership

Peer development and Parallelspace Corporation announce partnership to provide local North American marketing, sales and customer support for P4 Suite family of affordable customer contact, sales and service management solutions for Groove.

January 24, 2003

Heather Ashley Gentile

Congratulations to Sam Gentile !!!!!

January 23, 2003

Groovespace templates

Groove added some useful templates for Groovespaces to their website.

MS buys PlaceWare

ZDNet : Microsoft buys Net Collaboration firm PlaceWare

Gupta downplayed the impact on Groove. "The deal is complementary to what we're doing with Groove Networks," he said. "One of the key areas we are partnering with Groove is around the SharePoint Team Services initiative."

January 22, 2003

Groove and Tablet PC

Pen Computing reviews available software for the Tablet PC.

Groove's initial enhancement to support the Tablet PC is the addition of ink chat. Ink chat can be used for simple wireless messaging in a meeting, or you can embed images and other objects in the message, turning it into a kind of whiteboard messaging tool. There is also an existing sketchpad tool in Groove; with the availability of the Tablet PC's pen, the tool becomes much easier to use than with a mouse. Groove seems committed to the idea of digital ink, so future versions of the Groove workspace are likely to include additional ink support.

January 19, 2003

GWS is getting close

John Burkhardt : It looks like we're really close to shipping Groove Web Services. Things have turned out quite well. Between the beta and v1 we were able to move closer toward the feature that Jon Udell mentioned. It was tricky and it makes programming to GWS a bit harder, but the benifits are huge.

January 16, 2003

Rainer Volz Weblog

Rainer Volz has started a weblog as a part of his VRTPJ website (Virtual Teams and Distributed Projects) which is a valuable source of information for Groove and virtually any other Collaborationtool that is available.

January 15, 2003

Groove for elearning

Rick Lillie : I am very happy to see that a major organization like Tellabs has noticed the usefulness of Groove as a collaboration tool for training and development purposes.

More on P2P healthcare

More thoughts on P2P healthcare by Neil Finlayson

Reversi for Groove

A new Groovegame by Netsenger Corporation : Reversi

January 14, 2003

Peer-to-peer healthcare

Neil Finlayson talks about peer-to-peer Healthcare and the the way Mysterian is using Groove to develop a new breed of tools for medical specialists.

Why couldn't this have been done equally well using the Web? Well -

security of records was so much easier
Groove presence, chat and alerts were fundamental to the collaboration
automatic image synchronization meant that radiologist and radiographer views stayed in sync
the user interface is so much richer than that of the Web browser

January 13, 2003

Teamdirection Project 2.0

Teamdirection releases the 2.0 version of their excellent projectplanner for Groove. Check out what's new in this version.

January 12, 2003

Groove elearning weblog by Rick Lillie

Rick Lillie has started a weblog. Rick teaches at the California State University and has been using Groove for quite some time as a tool for for (online) learning in his classes. He's been feeding the Groove community regularly with userstories an valuable insights on elearning via the Groove forums and i'm sure this will continue through his weblog. Welcome Rick, i'm subscribed.

January 11, 2003

Collaboration cure

Infoworld : Collaboration cure

Groove Networks, in Beverly, Mass., is adapting its peer-to-peer collaboration system to Tablet PC. Ray Ozzie, Groove's CEO (and the creator of Lotus Notes) says, "Almost daily I have conversations on the phone with business associates and partners where I could use the ability to sketch a picture or visually share and annotate a document to enhance the communication."

January 10, 2003

Groovy Grid computing ?

SB Chatterjee : Globus Toolkit 3.0 is being released soon - this will integrate Grid computing with web services. This has tremendous potential for deploying Grid technologies in the mainstream. Hmm... an integration to the Groove web services environment perhaps ? Groove already has built-in space and node management and of course, robust security

Mysterian's Groove Radiology Manager

Forrest Duncan reports a notable milestone in the development of their medical Groove solutions. Congratulations !!!

New Years Day very auspiscious day for us. After some running around on the day, our Radiology Manager software was used for a real patient in a real case. The results were (even if I say so myself) very cool :-)

January 09, 2003

Parallelspace eMail 2.0

Parallelspace announces the availability of eMail 2.0 for Groove workspace. This latest release includes the ability to save any Outlook item (email messages, tasks, contacts, and calendar appointments) to any of the Top 5 Groove tools: Calendar, Contacts, Discussions, Files and Notepad.

January 08, 2003

From peer to maturity

NetworkWorldFusion : From peer to maturity

Network professionals are beginning to turn to peer-to-peer collaboration tools as flexible and efficient alternatives to bandwidth-intensive, server-based technologies. Peer-to-peer software lets end users set up workgroups on the fly, across the firewall, for sharing documents and conducting discussions, without having to run to the IT department.

January 07, 2003

Groove webcast

A new Groove Webcast is available : Collaboration for Bottom-line Results: How industry leaders are moving beyond email to save time and money."

January 06, 2003

Groovy collaboration with Macs

Brian Jepson : Will Groove's relay server link me up to other users' copies of a shared space (provided they have granted me access)? That could be just the thing that draws me in!

Creative disruption

Steve Gillmor and Jon Udell talk with Ray Ozzie on Disruptive technologies

A successful platform is fractal in nature. You can build something unintended out of the piece parts. At the user level, in Groove, users can quickly bring together tools, people, and systems to solve some problem. It's glue, all the way up at the user level. If you descend to the next level, as you well know, we didn't have anything at the outset of Groove that let a script do glue kinds of things. Now that's what the Web Services effort is attempting to target. The more you get toward the C++ end of the world, the less spontaneous it becomes. All disruption comes from a soup of elements from which unintended consequences can result.

January 03, 2003

Total Information Awareness

NY Times : Many Tools of Big Brother are up and running

The early version of the Total Information Awareness system employs a commercial software collaboration program called Groove. It was developed in 2000 by Ray Ozzie, a well-known software designer who is the inventor of Lotus Notes. Groove makes it possible for analysts at many different government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior.

Dropping Groove

Volker Weber switched to Mac OSX and dropped Groove for the moment :-( For me Groove is the main reason that keeps me from switching to a Mac for my day to day work but i have to say i'm tempted...................

back on track

I've been neglecting my weblog during the last couple of weeks because i still have no broadband at the new house and haven't been at the office a lot. I see i've got lot of catching up to do. btw Happy New Year to you all!!!