E-commerce Times : P2P goes corporate

Yahoo! News : Microsoft Lands Large Army Software Contract

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it clinched the largest single-deal contract ever for the world's No. 1 software maker, a $471 million pact to provide software for 494,000 personal computers to the U.S. Army.

Taken into account this week's news that Groove has been added to the Defense Collaboration Suite and the strong MS-Groove relationship, I can't help wondering if Groove Workspaces (+Sharepoint?) are somehow part of this deal. 

Groove Pressrelease : Groove Workspace Software Obtains First Defense Collaboration Tool Suite V2.0 Interoperability Certification.

Hugh reports that Wildgrape has added "post to Groove" functionality to their NewsDesk product.

Government Computer News : Defense collaboration gets into Groove

The 4-year-old Defense Collaboration Tool Suite, assembled from commercial sources for securely sharing of military video and audio conferences and applications, today got a new addition: Groove Workspace 2.5

A prerelease of Toucan (previously Groovelets) is available. Toucan Collaborate is a suite of productivity applications for Groove Workspace. developed by Virtual Methods. It contains tools for task management, event planning, enhanced discussion, risk management and collaborative document production. Click here to take the tour.

Alwayson Networks' pick of the Top 100 companies for 2003 includes Groove

Groove introduces Groove U, a software and service license program designed to meet the unique needs of higher education institutions. Groove U enables professors and administrators to harness the power of Groove Workspace on a course-by-course basis.

Groove publishes a new whitepaper named Use of Groove software in austere environments

Alongside the soldiers and other members of the military fighting in Iraq, was an often unseen but important group that was responsible for identifying and coordinating humanitarian aid. The people, from many governmentaland non-governmental groups including the U.S. Army,US Marines, UK DFID, International Medical Corps., Mercy Corps. and other civilian agencies, were in Iraq and neighboring countries to collect and share assessment data that would drive critical decisions about the prioritization and distribution of humanitarian aid. They were supported by Groove Workspace software, which is especially well suited for rapid deployment in austere environments such as the battlefields of Iraq.

Smart Solutions : Collaborating on Collaboration

Conceptually, Microsoft Office is still a document-centric system, enhanced with real-time services for presence awareness and real-time communication. Conceptually, Groove focuses more on verbs than nouns; it assumes a decentralized shared workspace context and delivers collaboration and powerful off-line/resync capabilities by asynchronously disseminating actions (verbs) within the shared context instead of replicating documents (nouns). This results in a different form-follows-function fit, despite some overlap and synergy. It's certainly not a right-or-wrong or either-or scenario. As previously noted, Groove and SharePoint were designed to address different customer needs, and their architectural differences are more complementary than competitive.

Infoworld : Groove taps app dev

Groove Networks this week will partner with LogicLibrary to integrate Groove's virtual collaboration software with LogicLibrary's software development asset mapping and discovery engine.

More info can be found on the LogicLibrary website

The first byproduct of the alliance is a discussion tool that LogicLibrary has created within Groove Workspace specifically for Logidex™, LogicLibrary's software development asset (SDA) mapping and discovery engine. This will enable software developers to more effectively manage their software resources and more easily collaborate to reduce the time required to build high-quality Web services and other critical software applications.

Rainer Volz : Introducing Peer-to-Peer, Part 2

Silicon.com : Through the fog... Better connecting users to technologies

We’ve been road testing tablet PCs and their suitability for various application types and looking at peer-to-peer collaboration tools such as Groove Networks. And it is in these areas where things have been getting interesting and indeed disruptive in no small measure.

Groove's John Giudice shows how to build applications using GWS. The Info Explorer looks very interesting and the sourcecode is available for those who want to take this a step further.

Robert Scoble : I gotta try out Groove again. It's been a while. I think it'd be useful for the projects I'm working on.

Ray points to an extensive casestudy on the usage of Groove at the Naval Postgraduate School.

BusinessWire : Groove Networks Expands Integration With Windows SharePoint Services & the Microsoft Office System

The Groove Document Librarian, a new tool for Groove Workspace, allows users to check out documents from SharePoint Portal Server 1.0 into a Groove shared space, and then check the document back in to the portal upon completion. For example, a pharmaceutical executive can check out a clinical trial document from the portal into a Groove shared space, and invite clinicians and physicians into the space to review the document. Once completed, he can check the document back in to the portal, having securely collaborated on a corporate asset outside company boundaries without VPN software, or having to host the portal server in the DMZ.

PTC offers a Student edition of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire. This release includes Peer-to-Peer Collaboration, powered by Groove

Miami Herald : Online collaboration gets it Groove back

Groove updates to 2.5d, John Burkhardt provides some details :

This release addresses many issues related to GWS.  If you are using GWS, or using a solution based on this technology then I highly recommend upgrading to this build.  No wait, I don't think its optional for developers:  this release includes the publication of the GWS COM APIs, which will allow developers to extend GWS functionality by creating new Web Services for the platform.  The other biggest issue by far was the problem where Groove itself could get wedged for a full 60 seconds when using http/1.1.  Ouch.

GXcel is released !!. GXcel integrates Excel with Groove and offers the best of both worlds. Realtime collaborative editing of Excelsheets for instance. The best thing is that it adds a whole new dimension to all sorts of custom, homebrew applications made in Excel. This makes Excel a very interesting environment for easy and rapid development of Groovy applications. Great stuff Ashok and Roomy :-)