Seattle Post-Intelligence : Gates shows new longhorn operating system

Microsoft plans to add peer-to-peer networking technologies to let co-workers, for example, send documents to each other that they can jointly view and annotate.

Peter O'Kelly in Microsoft Server System Magazine : The Future of Microsoft Collaboration

if you need to migrate or integrate with collaborative applications built on earlier Microsoft or competitive products, explore complementary offerings from vendors such as CASAHL. Consider Groove if you require robust, secure, off-line/edge-based collaboration with a community that isn't composed entirely of AD users.

Techweb : Vendors Jump On Office Bandwagon

Tweaks to Groove's flagship Workspace application allow users to share and co-edit Word 2003 documents, synchronize the Workspace calendar and meeting entries with Outlook 2003's, jointly view PowerPoint 2003 slideshows, and publish such data as e-mail contacts and messages to Groove collaborative workspaces.

SearchNetworking : Will 2004 be the year of IM management ?

"As far as IM goes, interoperability is really [number] seven or eight on the list of issues for enterprises," said Don Dodge, vice president of product management at Groove Networks Inc. in Beverly, Mass. But representatives of Yahoo, MSN and AOL weren't as eager to address interoperability questions.

Tim has found some time to rewrite our CADViewer for Groove. It's now completely written in .NET and feels much more stable. :-) Please take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

In light of the official introduction of MS Office 2003, Groove comes with a press release : Groove Networks Takes the Microsoft Office System "Out Of the Office" about the integration of Groove and office with a strong focus on Sharepoint. Hugh Pyle has some additional info especially on the Groove-Infopath integration

Also notable because we embed a small Groove Web Services client inside InfoPath. This brings pieces of Groove -- member awareness, instant messaging and invitations -- right into the Office application.

Robin Good interviews Groove's VP marketing Dave Fowler about Groove strenghts and weaknesses

SB Chaterjee links to a review of Groove an Kubi from last july by Stowe Boyd.

I found the product overall very productive and usable, but I dislike the user interface approach and believe a higher degree of integration between Groove's own tools is necessary for a richer environment, and likewise, a tighter linkage with Outlook is required.

NetworkWorldFusion : Virtual company, rock-solid assistance

In a typical day, Berona collaborates on hundreds of documents with her clients, running as many as three Groove sessions at once. “Groove allows me to stay in sync with my clients in real time,” she says.

Need a little help getting started with Groove Workspace? After installing Groove, contact the Groove Helper. Groove Helper is a LIVE Groove Workspace expert who can help you with the basics of getting started with Groove - within Groove Workspace.

Also on the Grooveforums. A 3rd party Groovedeveloper comments on the progress of Groove :

Given the enviroment I work in we actually develop custom functionality for some of our customers using groove, I'm starting to wonder, and become of the opinion that groove is too slow to add features to the mainstream product, and that the "groove standard tools" need to be released in some type of opensource model, where users can add functionalities, which may be accepted by Groove Networks, or that users (and their group of users can use that product.) Things like the files tool, while nice doesn't meet all of the functionalities that we will require to continue to use groove in the future. However I do not want to have to redevelop core functionalities in the files tool. rather I want to just enhance the functionality, and make available for other users. Plus truth is that Groove should focus on the core platform, and not on enhancements.

100% agree !!!

A comment in the Grooveforums pointed to a number of Groovetools developed by ISX. These tools are used in the context of the controversial Total Information Awareness program.

Dave Winer reacts to one of my previous posts and comments on the interoperability of Groove. He refers to an earlier discussion on some of our Groove-Radio experiments.

Laurent Kempé is experimenting with the Windows Sharepoint Services and Groove's latest update 2.5i.
btw if you're interested in what has changed in this update, Frank Arndt points to the Groove 2.5i changelog (PDF)

An interesting article in the Technology Review : Pushing Peer-to-Peer

KC Bolton muses about Groove and Home health systems

Vowe : A single individual with these constraints within a collaboration group will stop the groove. I have seen this so many times that I have almost given up. Yup, they need to collaborate too. Without a specific client. Neither Groove nor Internet Explorer. Really quickly, across all boundaries. With open protocols and lots of implementations. Like e-mail. Or something better

Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart have constructive criticism on Groove. Most of these points have been dicussed in the Groove forums and as a long time Grooveuser i can only agree.

Is it too much to ask to be able to move a file? (Not copy and then delete, but just move). I have a 167meg file in a Groove space, and I moved it to another folder (which means I copied it to another folder, and deleted the original, as there is no such thing as move). I instantly have 7 GB outbound, and Groove has been trying to sync it for 2 days now.

Sam Gentile reacts by adding his major complaint to the discussion : Performance.

I know Groove has been working on this and it gets better every release but I have a 2Ghz Pentium IV and 1GB RAM on Win2K3 on my laptop and performance is still quite sluggish particuarly in the area of screen refresh. My suggestion? Can the Groove non-standrad UI widgets altogether and use the native Windows ones. The eye candy is not of any use to me and performance is.

Couldn't agree more. Groove's sluggish performance is the main factor that i use Groove less frequent nowadays. My 500 mhz Vaio Laptop is just too slow for running Groove properly. Our business customers, to which we recommended Groove, are reporting the same. Effective collaboration is as strong as the weakest link and within most workgroups there is someone with a older PC (or a mac) that experiences major problems with Groove and refuses to start it up. This frequently brings the collaboration in the Groovespace to a halt and results in people turning to email again.

Ray posts a worthreading rant on how Email becomes increasingly unworkable for (business) collaboration and how Workspaces could be the solution:

If you're hoping for some super-duper neo-PIM to or super-filter or super-law to come along to make your life easier, spare yourself the agony and just think ahead: it is NOT a sustainable solution if it is still called "eMail". eMail is thirty years old, and we owe it a great debt of honor, but it has been pushed well beyond its design center and it's time to move on. Incrementally, progressively, but most definitely.

Doug Miller disagrees :

E-mail, for all its warts, works on any OS you'd care to name. It's also simple. It's based on standards, so anyone can implement an e-mail client or server. Because the protocols are well known and freely available, those server and client implementations can be as simple or feature rich as the user cares to select. Further, the thirty year legacy you scoff at ensures that communications I had years ago are still accessible to me - something I really doubt will be the case with information stored in any Groove database I might happen to use - because once Groove is gone, those databases might as well be smoke.

Dave Winer partly agrees but has a lot of questions about the openness of Groove:

It would be more convincing if Groove were open to competition, or at least open to being built on. When they came out with web services interfaces, finally, after years of waiting, the excitement was dampened because it didn't work with the programming environment I use. Maybe they are open to be extended, but, practically are there any extensions from people who are not working at or closely with Groove?

Hugh Pyle replies to Dave's comments and points to work done by 3rd parties including some of our earlier work:

To work with the Groove application from "outside" - a non-Groove.EXE process - use the GWS web services interfaces. I'm mystified by Dave's comment about "it didn't work with the programming environment I use": the wire protocol is SOAP. OK, so your programming environment can't use the "doc-literal" SOAP format natively? Why not fix that? Tim has done it. I've used GWS from Visual Basic, JavaScript, C#, perl and PHP.

Pressrelease : Groove Software Obtains Key Government Security Validations

John Burkhardt has left Groove and joins the Macromedia Royale Team. John did very important work by architecting Groove WebServices (GWS) and we worked closely with his team testing and exploring the possibilities of GWS ( like in our Groove Radio interoptool).

Although i'm saddened that Groove looses such an talented person i'm also glad he's joining the Macromedia Royale team as most of our development work nowadays focusses on Flash MX 2004. Macromedia initiatives like Central and Royale are very promising and spot on, in my opinion. However I still think that the combination Groove and Flash can be a very powerfull one as i described in some earlier posts on Flashy Groovetools and Groovy Flashapps.

John, good luck in your new job and i hope we'll be working with you again in the near future.

SB Chatterjee : Scott Hanselman has a very interesting article about The Myth of .NET Purity. It would certainly interest Groove developers who work with COM and .NET.

Syllabus Magazine : Groove Workspace Instant Messaging Grows Up

Been away for a almost a week. I'm now trying to catch up on Groove news and other interesting developments. Let me know if i've missed something interesting.