Hugh's ramblings: InfoWorld reviews Groove 2.5

February 16, 2003

InfoWorld reviews Groove 2.5

Jon Udell's comprehensive review of Groove 2.5 for the Infoworld Test Center.

Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future — years ahead of schedule.
...For developers, 2.5 is a watershed.. Groove's encapsulation of its API in managed code arguably goes beyond anything Microsoft has done with its own products.
...Until now, you had to step out of the mainstream to take advantage of Groove's advanced collaboration technology.

Here's the piece which I particularly want to expand on: interoperability. In particular the SharePoint Team Services glue, which debuts in Groove 2.5 (and I hope will expand going forward). For once, I don't think Jon completely "gets it".

Udell says

Also new in the Professional Edition of 2.5 is two-way synchronization between a Groove shared space and a Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (STS) Web site. Using a separately licensed Groove toolset called the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint, this bit of integration will appear more seamless to the STS user than it will to the Groove user.

Yes, true; we deliberately tried to keep much of the SharePoint user experience in moving STS lists into Groove shared spaces. But even this - lists, discussions - is an education in process.

What do people use to collaborate? #1: Documents. Opaque-blob, resolutely uncollaborative, determinedly non-semantically-queryable documents. Word, Excel, that stuff. #2: E-mail. #3: Discussions. Threaded responses (but this is really pushing the envelope). Documents are the stock-in-trade, and the most important piece of the STS integration because everyone just wants to share (and publish) files.

I work at Groove because I want to change that.

At the opposite extreme to document sharing, we've some Groove platform capabilities and tools which really open the door for "contextual collaboration". The platform's presence and notification mechanisms run deeply through the whole user experience. Then, for example, Pinboard very subtly shows each user what the other people are looking at right now. The experimental MeetCam lets you talk and work together while seeing others' expressions. A proof-of-concept GPS tool lets groups work (on documents, natch) in a space with "place" - showing the real positions of people and things. Several engineering visualization tools let teams work on, say, a support issue, but work with a shared perspective into a 3D model.

The "work on" will usually end up in something for publication: Word, PowerPoint, Web, whatever. Mostly "just files".

The "work in" and "work with" help people get things done, and here, blobs are not enough. Threaded discussions are a good place to start, especially when in SharePoint you can very easily add, say, a "Issue" field which is a lookup into your list of top issues. Then a "Red Flag" field which marks it as a task, or an action item. And so on. The collaborative environment is shaped by its users; it's ad-hoc application design.

Try that with the Groove SharePoint toolset. It just works. And - I'm incredibly excited by this - it's only the beginning.

Posted by hpyle at 11:49 AM