Microsoft Office Groove 2007 Frequently Asked Questions

Office Groove 2007 is a collaboration software program that allows teams to share information and work together on project activities—from simple document collaboration to custom solutions integrated with business processes. Teams using Office Groove 2007 work inside collaborative workspaces, which put all team members, tools, and information in one place. Office Groove 2007 workspaces keep teams up to date automatically and efficiently, and lets them work anywhere, anytime, and with anyone, so they spend less time coordinating and more time working.

Team projects and processes span departments, offices, organizations, time zones, and cultural boundaries. In order to maintain business speed and agility, organizations must help teams overcome these boundaries so that productivity and work quality are not compromised.

Office Groove 2007 helps teams bridge boundaries by providing a contextual work environment that adapts to the ways they need to work—inside the office and out, online and offline, with internal and external team members. By creating custom solutions and connecting Office Groove 2007 workspaces to existing business systems, organizations can ensure project activities naturally flow into structured business processes, quickening the overall pace of business.

By increasing both team and individual productivity, Office Groove 2007 helps teams complete projects on time and within budget. Because teams using Office Groove 2007 don’t need to meet or hold teleconferences as often, Groove can also help reduce travel and phone costs. Office Groove 2007 can help team members improve the quality of their work because they spend less time coordinating with each other and more time on their own contributions.

Any team of information workers that needs to collaborate on a project can derive value from Office Groove 2007. Team sizes typically range from 2 through 30 members for maximum productivity and effectiveness. Projects can range from document collaboration to custom solutions tied to existing business processes. Specific examples of projects that can be completed in an Office Groove 2007 workspace include:

There are five core elements of Office Groove 2007:

Office Groove 2007 will support the following languages when it is released to market: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese—Brazilian, Portuguese—European, Romanian, Russian, Serbian—Latin, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

Office Groove 2007 includes the following tools: Files, Discussion, Groove SharePoint Files, Calendar, Meetings, Issue Tracking, Forms, Groove InfoPath Forms, Notepad, Pictures, and Sketchpad. Several workspace templates with custom tools are included and more will be made available for download in the future.

Yes. Many individual Office Groove 2007 tools can be customized. In addition, Forms and Groove InfoPath Forms allow team members to design custom tools that can be added to any Office Groove 2007 workspace for the purposes of sharing and tracking data. For very rich enterprise solutions based on Forms or Groove InfoPath Forms, some IT assistance may be required, particularly where there may be a requirement to connect to enterprise systems.

All Office Groove 2007 workspaces, tools, and data are stored on each team member’s computer. Office Groove 2007 keeps each team member’s copy of the workspace, tools, and data synchronized, even if no two members are online at the same time, or if members are separated by firewalls. The Groove Launchbar provides a convenient interface to view all the workspaces on your computer. Workspaces can be organized into folders and viewed in different ways to help you identify new workspace content and activity.

Office Groove 2007 handles data conflicts differently for different types of data. Generally, for more structured data types (for example, business forms), Office Groove 2007 has built-in conflict resolution; for unstructured data (for example, documents), Groove 2007 ensures data preservation in all cases by creating a copy when two users edit the same file concurrently.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 is a Win32 application like the rest of the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system, requiring that each team member have Groove 2007 installed on their computer(s).

While there is no theoretical limit to the number of people that can be invited to an Office Groove 2007 workspace, the design center of the software is based on small teams (2-30 members).

Yes. Your Office Groove 2007 account can be shared across multiple, licensed computers in order to keep a synchronized copy of all your workspaces on each computer.

By default, all information shared in Office Groove 2007 workspaces is encrypted on users’ desktops and as it crosses a corporate network or the Internet. The network doesn’t have to be encrypted because the software itself does the encrypting and decrypting.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 provides several features to help mobile workers control when information in Groove 2007 workspaces is synchronized. See the Office Groove 2007 Product Guide for more detail.

The Groove Files tool and SharePoint Files tool allow team members to save their changes to a document as a new version, if desired. Teams wanting strict version control can publish documents from the SharePoint Files tool in Office Groove 2007 to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (version 3.0) document library, where version control can be implemented.

Office Groove 2007 workspace members are one of three roles: manager, participant, or guest. Each role has its own set of default permissions, which can be customized for the workspace as a whole and for the individual tools. By default, workspace creators are managers and others invited to workspaces are participants. Roles and permissions can be changed at any time during the life of a workspace.

Office Groove 2007 provides two mechanisms to notify team members of changes and activity: unread marks and alerts. Unread marks point out new content that has not yet been viewed by a team member. These marks are removed automatically when content is read, or can be removed manually. Alerts actively call out content changes and key events through text dialog boxes or sounds (for example, when a file is updated or when a team member enters a workspace). Alerts are customizable, and can be throttled up or down on specific workspaces and tools. This allows you, not the software, to decide what work is most important at any given time.

It depends on which option the user chooses. Managers can delete a workspace from all team members’ computers. Participants or guests of a workspace may only delete a workspace from their own computer(s).

While the vast majority of features of Groove Virtual Office version 3.1 are available in Office Groove 2007, some features and tools were removed, either because they were not heavily used or because their quality was in need of improvement. Some of these features and tools may return in a future version of Groove or be made available by download at a later date.

Find pricing and licensing information on the 2007 Microsoft Office System Pricing page.

Yes. Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office Packaging page.

Office Groove 2007 allows workers to share any Microsoft Office document within a workspace using the Groove Files tool, SharePoint Files tool or other tools that support file attachments such as the Discussion tool, Meetings tool, and Forms tool.

No. Office Groove 2007 supports documents created in the 2007 Microsoft Office release and prior versions, as well as documents created with other software applications.

Office Groove 2007 features a new tool called SharePoint Files that provides document library integration with Windows SharePoint Services V3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Groove SharePoint Files tool provides a seamless way for teams to collaborate on documents in an Office Groove 2007 workspace, publish them to a Windows SharePoint Services technology team site for sharing with a larger group, and store them on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for retrieval by the organization at large.

One of the core design goals of Office Groove 2007 is to ship the product with the highest degree of quality and user satisfaction of any Groove release. It was determined that the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint—in terms of usability, stability, performance, and extensibility—needed improvement. Many of the capabilities of the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint, however, have been replaced and improved with the SharePoint Files tool in Office Groove 2007.

Office Groove 2007 features a new tool called Groove InfoPath Forms that allows project teams to import InfoPath forms solutions into a Groove 2007 workspace for the purpose of collecting and aggregating data. The resulting Office InfoPath 2007 XML documents can be exported from the Office Groove 2007 workspace or integrated directly with an enterprise system.

Office Groove 2007 features new integration with Office Communicator 2005 and later. Directly from an Office Groove 2007 workspace or the Groove 2007 Launchbar you’ll be able to view your Communicator contacts and engage those contacts in real time using a Communicator phone call or an instant message. Office Groove 2007 presence awareness in workspaces and the Groove Launchbar matches the look and feel of the Communicator gumdrop icons.

From an Office Groove 2007 workspace Files tool or SharePoint Files tool, you can initiate a co-review session of a PowerPoint presentation. This allows you and your workspace members to view a presentation together in real time with just one click, perhaps in conjunction with a team meeting.

One of the core design goals of Office Groove 2007 is to ship the product with the highest degree of quality and user satisfaction of any Groove release. It was determined that integration with Outlook and Word in Groove Virtual Office version 3.1—in terms of usability, stability, performance, and extensibility—needed improvement. However, integrating Office Groove 2007 with other Microsoft Office system applications is a key priority in the Groove 2007 product roadmap. Some or all of the removed features may return in future releases of Office Groove with enhanced functionality, usability, and performance.

See the system requirements for Office Groove 2007.

If you are running Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1, you can upgrade to Office Groove 2007. If you are running Groove version 2.0, 2.1, or 2.5, you must first upgrade to Groove Virtual Office version 3.1 before you can upgrade to Office Groove 2007. You should make a back-up copy of your account before upgrading to Office Groove 2007.

You won’t notice any changes to tools or data in your existing Groove workspaces after upgrading to Office Groove 2007. However, new workspaces will only support the Office Groove 2007 tool palette—you will not be able to add previous tools that are no longer available in Office Groove 2007.

No. Anyone you invite to a workspace created with Office Groove 2007 must upgrade in order to accept the invitation. However, Office Groove 2007 users can accept invitations to workspaces created by users of Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 users and Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1 users will be able to exchange contact v-cards, view each others presence, and send and receive messages.

See the system requirements for Office Groove 2007.