Hugh Pyle released a new version of the open source Groove Newstool. Installs and works like a charm overhere, thnx Hugh :-)

Government Computer News : Collaborative software connects Navy graduate students

SB Chatterjee : Lately, I have been working with MS Office 2K3 Beta 2. A great product with several Office tools. Two notable ones are InfoPath and OneNote and both are strongly linked to SharePoint Services. Groove is linked to SharePoint - all put together it makes SharePoint the hub. Will SharePoint Server replace the Groove Enterprise Integration Server albeit in a limited capacity? An interesting idea well worth exploring.

Stefan Smalla blogs a conversation with Ray Ozzie from the Future in Review Conference.

The Groove DevZone has a new look and a RSS Feed.

update : Greg just told me that this RSSfeed is broken according to the RSS-Validator. It worked allright on my Radio so i didn't bother to check it the first time. I hope it gets fixed soon > it's fixed now :-)

ZDNet : It's time to rebuild the Internet

Ozzie believes that the industry should embrace a more "cellular" model for trust and authentication instead of the current hierarchical security model. "Today, each enterprise has its own directory. The different directory products allow for delegation and assume that trust is hierarchical--meaning the boss authorizes employee access levels --but that's not the way people interact across increasingly decentralized enterprises or within peer groups," Ozzie said. Groove has built a more cellular-oriented trust and authentication model to get around the firewall problem in its own domain, but it won't be easy to go beyond that realm.

Neil Finlayson : HyperCard->Notes->Web->Groove->InfoPath

InformationWeek brings an indepth story on the status of the Total Information Awareness program  including an interview with Groove's Michael Helfrich

The technologies that will come into play include Veridian software, data objects based on XML's Policy Markup Language, software agents that link Groove work spaces with server-based data and services, Web-services standards, and IBM's Cynefin knowledge-management framework.

Don Park : Ray Ozzie has been blogging mostly about blogging and occasionally social software.  His exploration-style writing has attracted a large following, but I doubt his blog has generated sales for Groove.  Until now, that is.  Today, he raved about TeamDirection, a third-party Groove application along with a cool screenshot. I don't think Ray was trying to do anything other than give an honest opinion about a great piece of software, but I believe the effect on the bottomline will be tremendous.  Most people just don't realize that Groove is an application platform.  The best way to sell an application platform is to do what Ray did today, evangelizing applications.  And don't forget to throw in eye-candies!

Scott Loftesness  : I need a relatively simple Groove application that would seem to have widespread applicability across the Groove community. Many years ago, there was an application called InfoLog (on the Macintosh) which allowed a user to create an index of metadata that would allow a variety of information elements to be associated with a particular paper document. The paper document would have one and only one identification -- a serial number. The serial numbers were assigned in ever increasing numbers as InfoLog entries were added. What I need is an InfoLog built into Groove -- allowing me to share a common paper file numbering system with my far flung colleagues! Contact me if you know of this application for Groove.

KC Bolton writes up some notes on effective Groovespace Design

Over the last couple of days 2 new public Groovespaces were started. Groove-Wireless technology is a space started by SB Chatterjee to discuss the potential of  Groove and Wifi networks. Neil Finlayson of Mysterian also started a space where you can have a look at their Radiology Manager medical Solution in Groove. btw : Rainer Volz is maintaining a list of these and other public Groovespaces

Neil Finlayson : I still don't understand why Groove don't milk flash crowd for all its worth and start building celebrity spaces. Forrest talked about this a long time ago. Yes I know there's a kind of unbearable shallowness about this notion. But also, I think a powerful one. Provide good speakers, good Groove DJs, or an expert and a crowd will gather. To potentially good effect.

Marc Pierson : I have been using Groove for a little while. I think that it is the third and essential piece of information technology needed for cross-organizational communities of learning. (not counting e-mail which I take for granted). The first is Weblogs--the place to hold context, to get to know people. The second is something like WebCrossings--a place to have and keep discussions and documents by topic. And third, Groove for private, secure, multi-participant collaborations.

Ray Ozzie : What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction.

Joe O'Laughlin continues to test our Bloggertool for Groove. This time with the new DANO Blogger API and it seems to work :-)

Biowire2K : Cambridge Healthtech Institute Names Groove Networks As Founding Partner of its Pharmaceutical Strategy Series

Paresh Suthar makes some interesting observations on corporate deployment of Groove Workspaces

Yesterday I was part of  a meeting with a company that has been developing enterprise scale Groove applications for a while.  During the course of the meeting, one of them indicated what they see as the value proposition of Groove - "center to edge to center".  That is, taking data from center based systems and putting it into Groove for collaboration, and when the collaboration is complete, taking the data from Groove and putting it back into a center based system. 

This is similar to some conclusions drawn from a public Groovespace experiment we did last year. We started a space to interact and discuss a specific subject in this case Groove integration scenarios, posted the invitationfile to the web and waited to see what would happen. Within a couple of hours a lively discussion started in the space. Over a period of 5 or 6 days there was a lot of activity on and off topic. Jon Udell wrote two reports during that period that give a good insight in what took place.
A Groovespace offers an intimate, almost physical environment to interact and a hyperactive space like this where you constantly "meet"  lots of new people proved to be a very exciting and fruitful environment but also an exhausting sometimes even intimidating experience. For five days the space felt more like an event or conference with lots of smalltalk and direct interaction. After that you saw a big decline in discussion and participation almost like the particpants went back home ;-) Somewhere in the discussion Michael Herman wrote:

Q: What happens to edge-based content as it ages? e.g. a richly populated Groove shared space
A: As soon as the content can be indexed and searched, it may physically live at the edge but logically, it becomes a center-based resource.

After the Groovespace ran out of steam and passed the point of diminishing returns. we decided to close down the space and bring the content back from the edge (Groovespace) to the center (public internet) Tim wrote a tool to export the dicussion to OPML and publish it directly via Radio. 
By having a online spacearchive (also posted below in iFrame) there would be no real need for the participants to keep the inactive Groovespace forever on there computers and brought the discussion back to the public domain which kinda closed the circle.

 

note: If this would be a corporate scenario the aged Groovecontent could be easily posted to the intranet for indexing and future reference in the same way. offering an quick center-edge-center route which might fit the needs of larger workgroups of Grooveusers.

Infoworld : The battle for decentralization

For now, you can try to keep your employees on a cluster of centrally managed Lotus Notes servers for "collaboration," but once they take 10 minutes to download and install Groove Workspace, they will ultimately self-organize within "shared spaces" that require no server -- and your role as collaboration traffic cop will quickly become irrelevant.

Ray Ozzie : A little known fact: Groove would quite possibly have been implemented in Java had it not been for Sara.

John Schull : Can someone compare Hydra/iStorm to Groove ?

Joel Orr's ExtranetNews makes a comparison between Kubi and Groove

You can't avoid comparing Groove and Kubi. Groove's been around much longer, and so is more highly refined. It has many more collaborative features—"tools" you can add to shared spaces—than Kubi, but Kubi has all the essential ones (and is sure to add more over time). Groove has "differencing"; only actual differences are replicated to shared-space members, not entire documents, as in Kubi Client; with big documents, this represents a major performance advantage. It has automatic "versioning," which must be done manually in Kubi.
Kubi Client's killer advantage is that it lives inside of Outlook or Notes. You don't switch apps to use it, when you are in email. You don't maintain multiple calendars or address books, or have to import or export them.