Get to know Office Groove 2007
One of the most exciting additions to 2007 Microsoft Office System is Office Groove 2007. Although new to Office System, Groove started life in October 2000 when the first beta version was shipped by Ray Ozzie’s company Groove Networks. Microsoft acquired Groove Networks in April 2005, and now Ray Ozzie is Microsoft’s chief software architect, a position previously held by Bill Gates himself. Office Groove 2007 is clearly a significant product for Microsoft.
What makes Office Groove 2007 particularly exciting is the approach it takes to collaborative work. For most of us, collaboration means shared folders on the server and emails going back and forth between members of the team. Some of us may use Microsoft SharePoint to provide more structured support, however these are all essentially client/server solutions which require members to connect to a central host where the shared information is stored.
Working together
By contrast, Office Groove 2007 takes a peer-to-peer approach. Once you have installed Office Groove 2007 you can start creating workspaces that contain the information that you want to share. A workspace can simply be a folder on your desktop containing files that other team members need to access, or it can contain any of the more sophisticated collaboration tools that come with Office Groove 2007.
Having created your workspace you can start inviting colleagues to join. If your colleagues have installed Office Groove 2007 then they will receive the invite as an instant message within the application itself. Otherwise invitations can be sent as standard email messages, in which case the recipient is given instructions on how to download a trial version of Office Groove 2007. Once they accept the invitation an exact copy of the workspace is downloaded onto their machine, either from you if you are online at the time, or from any other workspace member who happens to be connected.
Once a workspace is established, any of its members can work on its content, whether they are connected to the Internet or not. Behind the scenes, each copy of Office Groove 2007 is busy keeping each copy of the workspace up-to-date in an intelligent fashion, transmitting encrypted ‘deltas’ between members which contain just the information that has changed.
This is the beauty of Office Groove 2007. Workspaces can be shared across organisations and even to roaming users who spend just a little time online, perhaps through a public wireless access point. Data is distributed across all the workspace members rather than stored in one central server. Furthermore, because only encrypted ‘deltas’ are transmitted, rather than full copies of each file, data exchange is very secure.
The main control panel for Office Groove 2007 is the Launchbar (shown above). Here you see a list of the workspaces that you have created or joined. There is also a contact list that displays the status of other members: whether they are online or not and whether they are active in any of the workspaces. Workspaces which have changed since you last visited are highlighted.
You can also chat to other Groove members from the Launchbar. Chats work in much the same way as they do in Windows Messenger, for example, except that if a chat looks as though it may be of lasting value you can save it as a Groove workspace. Alternatively you can chat from within an existing workspace, in which case the chat is automatically saved as part of the workspace.
A file-sharing workspace is simply a folder on your machine that has additional functionality showing you the status of other members of the workspace and allowing you to chat with them. Alternatively you can create a Standard workspace that contains not only a space for sharing files but also a Discussion tool where members can conduct threaded conversations (see below).
Going further you can create workspaces that contain any combination of the tools that come with the package, or any that have been uploaded by other users to the Groove Web site. Available tools range from collaborative games such as Chess and Reversi through to shared calendars, a drawing tool, a meeting organiser and a picture organiser. New to Office Groove 2007 is a SharePoint Files tool which allows your workspace to include documents from SharePoint libraries.
Creating your own Groove tool is easier than it sounds, thanks to the built-in forms designer. Here you can design a form specific to your needs so that team members can input, edit and share data about, for example, the status of a project. Also new to Office Groove 2007 is the ability to import forms created using Office InfoPath 2007.
Staying up-to-date
Office Groove 2007 relies on communication between workspace members to keep each member up-to-date. But what happens if you open up a workspace at a time when none of your colleagues are online? This is where Groove gets really clever as it also employs a central Groove relay service. If there are members of a workspace who are not connected, then the ‘deltas’ are sent to the relay service where they are queued, ready to be forwarded. The relay service transmits the changes as the members reconnect, emptying the queue when it is no longer needed.
All Office Groove 2007 users have access to a basic relay service, but for greater control and additional management services we suggest you subscribe to Groove Enterprise Services. For larger organisations there is Office Groove Server 2007 which gives you your own relay service, used only by members of the organisation’s workspaces with full administrative control.
Even with your own Office Groove Server 2007 installation, Office Groove 2007 remains essentially a peer-to-peer system as the relay service is only used to store and forward the ‘deltas’, and does not contain a full copy of the workspace. This is only held on the member’s machines, giving each member high-speed access whether they are online or offline.
Ad-hoc collaboration
Office Groove 2007 is a revelation for anyone who has used server-based solutions for team collaboration. It allows the team to take control, creating ad-hoc decentralised solutions that can be highly sophisticated and yet immediately adapted to the problem at hand. Why not give it a go now by downloading the trial?
