Lot's of talk on Groove in the Computerworld article : Meeting of the minds: Technology for business "swarming"

Swarming is a type of collaboration in which large numbers of geographically dispersed people quickly self-organize in a peer-to-peer network to deal with a problem or opportunity. It's a fluid, shifting network with no central control or hub.

There is a new Groovetool available: Virtual Sales Office is a set of customized sales team collaboration tools, sales training content, and the powerful "Strategy Mapping" opportunity tracking and sales forecasting system. The tool is designed by SalesConference.net and can be downloaded for free from the Groove Website. More information on the tool can be found on Tim McMahon's Weblog
On first sight the tool looks similar to Peer Development's P4CRM tool but as i haven't installed VSO at this moment, i can't draw any conclusions yet.

Computerworld : How Groove's swarming technology works

Internetweek : Collaboration Moves Out Of The Silo

Carlson Wagonlit Travel Inc. is letting more people author and publish projects from TeamDirection to a Web-based view of Microsoft Project via Groove's software. "We're getting a lot more feedback, and a lot more projects are being entered into the system," says Daniel Oertli, IT director of the company's Australian operations.

NetworkWorldFusion reviews 3 collaborative solutions including Groove

Forgot to link to last week's interview with Ray Ozzie in Businessweek Online : Our Biggest Competitor? The Status Quo. As allways it's a good read.

To hear Ray Ozzie tell it, he and his cohorts at Groove Networks never thought about pitching their user-friendly collaboration software to small businesses. Then, the e-mails and phone calls started rolling in. "We've noticed this emerging phenomenon," Ozzie says. "The smaller businesses are just getting the software and figuring out what it's useful for."

Robin Good responds to Rick Lillie's comments with a long and very worthreading analysis on Groove's strong and weak points.

Groove is a tool that needs a vision behind it. Not a technologically-bred vision, nor a marketing instilled one. A vision for what real, effective, intuitive collaboration means for real people online.

I hope my comments and vision are taken with due irony and perspective. The goal here and in my previous article was to drive a specific point about Groove and its possible future, not certainly to bash and superficially criticize a tool that has evidently more merits that problems.

It is the rule of the market that Groove will need to do something to survive, to better understand what it is offering and how to best package this "experience" to those many ones, (I am certainly one) that would love to see it bloom.

Rick Lillie disagrees with Robin Good's article on Groove and has mailed him about his own experiences :

For me, using Groove is like having a personal assistant. Groove comes to me with information. I do not have to go to Groove to discover that something has changed. Blackboard and similar LMS programs cannot say this. Like all programs, Groove has its technical strengths and weaknesses. However, it has a very significant financial strength that the major LMS programs cannot claim. Groove is inexpensive.

Chad Dickerson : Groove has it right because Ray has it right. (So does the CIO of a 100,000+ employee company, whom he quotes anonymously.) It feels good to be on the phone, drop a file into a secure "shared space" and have the person on the other end say almost instantaneously -- "got it!" No dealing with replication, firewalls, or other annoyances. That's the way collaboration needs to work in 2003.

John Burkhardt : I have lots of exciting plans for GWS and we're working on the next version in earnest. It has been incredible being a part of this project and watching it make its way in the world. Building v1.0 of GWS was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my professional career. Thanks again everyone for the encouragement and support. Its only going to get better from here!

Tabula PC : Speaking of Groove, why isn't there a free, "LE" or "SE" edition that's given away with every tablet and computers ordered by schools and corporations?

For my new weblog i made a little button to hold my Groove V-Card. Feel free to use it for your own Blog or website.

Ray is looking for WiFi-enabled criminals

Robin Good sums up a list of Groove's current shortcomings in the article : Groove: Ten Good Reasons Not To Buy

Groove is great once you are inside it, as it allows to preserve, edit, archive, exchange and communicate so much of what is relative to a project, it just seems unreal. Flexibility, variety of tools, some good integration and many see-ahead ideas make the environment quite great for all those of you who enjoy technology at its best and have the means to support it: recent hardware and good Internet connectivity. Groove shines under those auspices.
But do you see me, poor secretary, assistant producer or field monitor, starting a space in Groove all by myself?
No?
Wonder why it is so hard to make Groove beyond an historical technology milestone and into mainstream use? Here are some answers to ponder upon.

I can certainly relate to a number of points he makes, I even think he forgot some crucial ones like the absence of search and Mac OSX support. As i've been closely following the Groove community over the past 2 years, a lot of these issues are regularly being raised on the Groove forums and some of these issues are solved by 3rd party solutions like the ones from PopG , Parallelspace and Virtual Methods.

Still Groove offers the most natural virtual environment i've encountered and our small business uses and depends on it on a daily base. Although a lot of work still needs to be done in my opinion, Groove is finally gaining some real traction and marketshare and developments like GWS and the .NET Toolkit have a huge potential for future Groovebased solutions within or outside the Groove Transceiver.

Federal Computer Week : Integration reaches new heights with Groove

More coverage on the Groove-TeamDirection solution :

Infoworld : Groove tackles project management

CRN : Groove Networks Bundles Project Apps With Its Peer-To-Peer Workspace

Groove Press Release : Groove Networks and TeamDirection elevate project management to a team sport

News.com : Groove wades into Project Management

Groove Networks said Monday it will resell a project management application from TeamDirection with its peer-to-peer collaboration software. The bundle, called Groove Workspace Project Edition, will include Groove's tools to share documents and communicate with co-workers.

Congratulations to Dan, Brigitte and the rest of the team of TeamDirection who have been steadily building their Instant Projecttool into an professional , bundled Groove solution. It seems like the market for 3rd party Groovetools is finally maturing a bit.

Ray and Hugh demonstrate the power of adhoc collaboration. On his weblog, Ray launches the intriguing idea of a Hyki (Hydra + Wiki)

Hugh decides to take on the challenge an brews a working prototype of a Groovebased Hyki using GWS, in less then 5 hours. The screenshot looks really interesting and i can't wait to get my hands on it. For more information check some of Hugh's notes on this prototype

Businessweek Online : For some, the Godsend of Groove

Some of Groove's customers exhibit a frankly evangelical zeal for the product, and Lazar is no exception... "Our CEO at least once a day is cursing at me about our server and our networks, so I would love to see the day when all of that will disappear," he says. "I could really see just doing away with the network and doing all of our functioning on Groove. I think that is within the realm of possibility."

Finally i found some time to give my old weblog a serious makeover. I decided to switch from Radio to Movable Type as i needed a more webbased blogging solution and our new Suite75 site will also be powered by MT (currently under development)
Importing all previous entries from the last 1.5 years proved to be very simple so feel free to visit the archives or use the search page. From now on i'll have comments enabled so you can say what you think of my new Blog and please let me know if you run into any problems. I'm still ironing out some issues..........

Intranet Journal : Groove and Microsoft take office out of the office

Groove Networks is getting its groove on with Microsoft's SharePoint in a pairing that brings big benefits to mobile intranet users. Separately, each product has a lot to offer, but together they offer an ideal solution for mobile professionals that neither alone can provide.

Destination.NET : A Hot P2P Company Moves to .NET-based Architecture

Some renewed interest in our Groove-Radio Interop Tool due to an Infoworld column by Chad Dickerson:

This leads to my second Weblog, which isn't actually a Weblog per se -- it's a Groove discussion for members of InfoWorld's technology department. It functions essentially as a group Weblog (in fact, Tim Knip's Groove Interop Tool for Radio can make it officially a Weblog).

Too bad we don't have plans for an update of this Groovetool in the near future. NonGroove related projects take up all of our time. Still good to see people are using it :-)

Infoworld : Thwarting the enemy within

As our readers revealed in the Security Survey, they have a pressing need for ad-hoc VPN capability. Secure e-mail and Groove are two viable ways to get it now. The flurry of interest surrounding Waste, the secure peer-to-peer software that AOL's Nullsoft division released and then hastily withdrew last month, suggests that other options may soon emerge. The societies fenced in by our firewalls are complex, and we need more than a few tools to manage their safety.

Webupdate : Get Groovin'

We at Web Update found the shared file space the most useful part of the workspace. While developing a recent newsletter, we used it to share story ideas, store article lists, as well as the final copy. We tended to use the chat features the least, probably because we are a small company and communicate often in person. But for companies with remote offices, or staff on the road, this chat feature could be frequently used.

ACM Queue : Designing Portable Collaborative Networks

Peer-to-peer technology and wireless networking offer great potential for working together away from the desk—but they also introduce unique software and infrastructure challenges........

Ray posts a long worthreading rant on Extreme mobility. In reaction to this piece Volker asks the logical question : Why is Groove Networks focussing its sales & marketing on the large enterprise?

An interesting casestudy on the usage of Groove within a consultancy company.

During the period of travel restrictions imposed as a result of the SARS outbreak, using Groove Workspace for new business development efforts became more critical. Says Schoonover: "Groove was just a massive life saver when we couldn't travel because of SARS.

Maybe the choice of words is a bit unlucky but it clearly shows Groove's strong points.

Paresh and Hugh point to a very interesting way to use the Groove filestool : Collaborative viewing and storing of (offline) webpages. Thnx Seth for the original tip!!

Good news from India: Ashok Hingorani picks up his weblog.