After checking the Groove Access Point for remote access to my computer running Groove Workspace resolved the last missing link: exposing a Web Service for a custom Groove Tool. This means that any Groove tool can be queried from a remote location (from your PocketPC for example). Paresh Suthar thinks what I’m thinking:

The more I thought about this, the more I started to see what could be a paradigm shift with respect to content creation and publication. Tim demonstrates how to take a personal activity like blogging and shift it into a group activity so that multiple people can contribute[…]The paradigm shift mentioned above could allow for Groove to be used as a staging facility for publication, from which content is read/written by groups of people

Check here for my facility for publication.Thank you Hugh for a hint I really needed.

Hugh wants to list files from Groove in a treemap and asks whether that's easy to do using Groove Web Services and PHP...Yup, very easy, besides the treemap, 8-). Check here for a sample PHP-class using NuSOAP. Good stuff, those treemaps, would indeed be a nice way to present Groove-data.

Check Smartmoney's Map of the Market for an example of a treemap.

Up until now I only had a look at accessing Groove Web Services (GWS) locally (SOAP-client on same device as Groove Workspace). The Groove Access Point can be used to access GWS remotely. Although remote access is only available in 'Preview Mode' in the current release of Groove (2.5a), it gives a good insight in what will be possible.

Check out this page to see 'remote access' in action. I use PHP and NuSOAP to do some simple Read-operations on a remote Groove-account. So how does it work? First one has to register with the Access Point, so the AP knows to which device to forward the request. This is done by the 'gnslnsreg' utility which can be found in de Web Services GDK (gnslnsreg has dependencies on the MS SOAP ToolKit 2.0 SP2 and MSXML3.0, so make sure you've got those installed). After registering it's simple: make the call to http://webservices.groove.net as you would do with a local request.

Have been reading this lengthy but interesting essay by Paul Graham. Not sure I agree completely, but it sure describes my high-school time with high accuracy...

Hugh Pyle checks out my standings on the Technorati Interesting Newcomer list. #2! Lets not be that modest: two days ago it was even the #1 spot! Hehe! Now rapidly falling though.... #47. Getting mentioned by the right people surely boosts the standings.

Upgraded the grooveInterop Tool for Radio Userland to version 0.5.

• uses Groove Events instead of reading the whole discussion every minute (now the tool just reads pending events every minute)
• replies to topics are now shown as a threaded list instead as seperate posts
• the memberlist now refreshes every hour (bugfix: the memberlist was only updated after setup...)
• BLOG, NEWS or FILES can now be enabled/disabled in setup

• new users: download grooveInterop 0.5 from here
• existing users: restart Radio, and, just to be sure run setup again.

Ashok Hingorani has been busy: check out his Excel Tool for Groove.

Yeah! It works… the grooveInterop Tool is now subscribed to the Groove Discussion Tool from where I blog this. When an entry is added, edited or deleted, the event is added to the event-queue. Hehe, this is much better then reading the complete discussion each minute….

Just released version 0.4 of the grooveInterop Tool for Radio Userland. This version fixes a number of bugs.
NOTE: If you have a previous version installed, then restart Radio to upgrade and re-run setup .

Tim Knip/Suite75:
Testing the latest build of Groove Web Services (GWS) in conjuction with Radio. Even more SOAP-headers! The so-called IdentityURL has moved to the SOAP-header. Writing this from a Groove discussion-tool. A Radio-tool uses GWS to check the discussion for new/edited entries..