I sometimes think of Groove as the poor cousin of the office suite, to many it is the application with the funny name that appears with the other tradition Microsoft office tools such as Excel or Word that everyone uses. Doing a bit of background reading before the session started didn't really help either, most articles online spoke more about Ray Ozzie as an individual than the product that brought him and his company into the Microsoft Fold.
The session here at Tech Ed Developers had a little of an inauspicious start too, although billed as a joint interactive session headed up and moderated by Fabrice Barbin and Mark Ryan, only Fabrice was up there at the start looking rather perplexed as to his colleague's absence and suggested that the morning of the last day had caught up with Mark.
We were treated to a view of the capabilities of Groove, from the basic "this is what it does" with a dusting of "this is how it works with SharePoint" we were also treated to an introduction to its support for developers and a hint at the future. All in all, I came away with the impression that despite the name "Groove", the product isn't what I would call funky but it brings with it concrete, solid, and very useful functionality to get the job done. It allows individuals on the same network to share and collaborate, with a distributed and peer to peer model for synchronising files around a workspace. It encrypts storage and traffic, and is happy offline and online. Workspaces have members and for the period of time that they work, the workspace is active and then can be archived when things wind down. To help step up to the next level, it offers a server to allow users from different networks to join in the fun, and can integrate with the document library storage in SharePoint.
All solid stuff, and it works. It also has a forms capability - which is great for a formal setup but for me kind of pins down the "get on with it" philosophy that I see in the rest of the product.
As borne out by Fabrice, Groove as a company really bought in to the .NET philosophy and in what I see as a really unusual feature from a product that started outside Microsoft, the API support, object model and web service arrangements all look like something I would expect of a product once it had bedded down in Microsoft. In fact, I think the work on Groove in upcoming versions is to blend it functionally in to the SharePoint world of things so that people don't overlook the proper capabilities it has that aren't anywhere else. Sure, you can check out a document and use it offline but Groove is the bit that allows you to make lots of progress within the boundaries of your workspace without worrying unduly about missing the other information that has been uploaded or having that multitude of mobile phone calls from colleagues asking you to check in that document so they can add their bit. Although blocked by NDA, Fabrice reassured us to an extent that Groove was going to me a bigger part of the SharePoint story.
What really made me thing at the end was a response by a guy who I took to be Mark Ryan who had joined us towards the end of the session. In the QA at the end one of the attendees complained that it was difficult to make a strategic recommendation for a company without knowing about the current product (the session covered this) and what was in the next. The point made was that you don't bet your company on Groove, it is a tactical product. On first hearing this struck me as a strange statement, but on reflection it hits the nail on the head. You set up a Groove workspace, you work on that project or bid, then you close down and archive the workspace. This does not last for months or years, it might just last for weeks. That is where groove fits in.
Key Facts:
Session Code: OFC05-IS
Speakers: Fabrice Barbin, Mark Ryan
Track: Office and SharePoint
Rating: 8/10
Attendance: 10