Groove positioning and Office 12
Mac Olsen is the Group Program Manager for Groove integration
Key points about Groove:
- Best for people who need to work with each other when they don’t share a common infrastructure
- Need to work off-line
- Need robust security
A few extra services have been created to make Groove more acceptable to corporate IT, but it is still frowned upon in many enterprises because it is client centric, stores data locally and allows uncontrolled leakage of information outside of the firewall, (although email does this too). The Audit server provides some additional control
Most of the functional gaps that differentiate WSS and SharePoint have been addressed by the Office 12 WSS and Outlook integration for off-line working. The main area that still differentiates is that WSS/Outlook still depends on all parties having access to a WSS server infrastructure. Although Outlook does not provide an integrated workspace view in the same way as Groove for the off-line content.
This is the positioning, that Microsoft used:
- Small groups of people
- Small amount of time
- Information published outside of groove at the end of the project
- Participants in different companies
- Participants need to work off-line
- Participants don’t share a common infrastructure, maybe don’t even have access to a common server, ie only have reliable peer to peer access, for example a team may only have access to an ad-hoc wireless network with no access to the Internet.
Groove 4:
- Core focus, ad-hoc, secure, cross-enterprise collaboration for mobile workgroups
- packaged as part of one of the Office bundles
- continue to make available stand-alone for some customer scenarios
- improved usability on multiple customers
- increased server capacity, performance and scalability
- localised in 17 European languages and Japanese
- improved integration with WSS, focus on document libraries in groove 4, including integration with check-in/out functionality. This is less integration than currently provided between v3.1 and WSS v2
- integration with InfoPath, InfoPath will be able to create forms for Groove data collection, although the existing forms tool will still be supported
- Integration with LCS etc, so that other presence providers can be integrated into groove
