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 TEST CENTER Getting into the Groove By Jon Udell April 15, 2002 GROOVE 2.0, SLATED for release on April 15, delivers richer collaboration for users and more control for corporate administrators. Some might find these aims contradictory, but Groove has never been a pure peer-to-peer product. The strategy was always to empower end-users to spontaneously share information within and across company borders while at the same time meeting IT requirements for security, data integrity, and availability. The new version advances these agendas. It also cements Groove's 6-month-old relationship with Microsoft, offering points of integration with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Project.
This is useful for review, but chaotic for editing. To edit, a member clicks the Edit button on the floating toolbar, which signals an edit in progress. The synchronized viewing stops, and changes are applied in the editor's copy. When the editor releases control, changes flow back and synchronized viewing resumes. To create the real-time edit/review feature, Groove's developers had to dig deep into the APIs of supported applications. Word and PowerPoint were first; it's likely that other Office (and non-Office) applications will follow. Making these adaptations can be painful, though, and must be done on a case-by-case basis. What can developers of new applications do to make Groove integration less painful? Use the same MVC (model-view-controller) architecture that native Groove apps do, says Jack Ozzie, Groove's vice president of development. Not many applications do this today, but the emerging Web services paradigm -- which encourages a message-oriented, MVC-style of development -- bodes well for future Groove integration. Groove-style collaboration is based not simply on shared software and data, but on shared context. The new Document Review tool delivers context in spades. It's used for asynchronous, rather than real-time, review. A member who adds the tool to a shared space and populates it with Word, Excel, or other documents, can then assign other members of the space to review these documents. Marked-up versions are stored in a tree visible to all members. A threaded discussion inside the tool enables the group to discuss the review process. When everyone is finished, the documents can be batch-exported to a folder and merged. The review leader can then seal off a version and later launch a new revision cycle Note that real-time co-editing and asynchronous document review are different features, implemented in different tools, using different data stores. In general, the new collaborative features work in tool-specific contexts, creating silos of data not easily integrated across tools and shared spaces, or outside of Groove. One new tool that combats this trend is the Dashboard, which summarizes the data in two other new tools, Meeting Manager and Project Manager. The Meeting Manager provides a structured way to invite members to a meeting, share an agenda, and take notes. An action item created in this tool percolates up to the Dashboard, as do tasks defined in the Project Manager. You can also export meetings to MS Outlook, and projects to MS Project. A major advance in Groove 2 is the Forms tool, which enables end-users to create record sets, forms to populate them, and views to display them. This used to require API-level customization. The Groove Forms tool, which echoes one of the more popular features of Lotus Notes, comes with a set of templates for specific applications. We selected and customized the Issue Tracker template, but the results (using a release candidate of Groove 2) were mixed. Although the Forms tool invited us to redefine the terms used to categorize issues, we couldn't assign those terms to new issues. A mechanism enabling users to define new terms on the fly did work, but didn't retain the new terms for future use, requiring us to retype them. The search feature was problematic, requiring exact and complete strings, and failing for dates. The Forms tool, in short, is promising but rough around the edges. Groove 2 happily addresses one of the major drawbacks of 1.x: its isolation from e-mail. Version 2 tackles this problem for Outlook users by enabling them to gather a complete e-mail thread plus attachments, create a shared space, and invite the thread's participants into that space. This fluid transition mirrors one of the more subtle but powerful aspects of Groove: the ability to move seamlessly from a fragmentary message-based dialogue into a shared space. Version 2 includes several welcome performance optimizations. When documents stored in the Files tool change, only the differences propagate. A new communications manager enables road warriors to pause synchronization on a per-shared-space basis, and thus prioritize data exchange on slow links. The user interface, however, is no snappier than Version 1.3 on my 550MHz ThinkPad iSeries. Groove Networks says tackling that issue will be a major focus in Version 2.1. Searching within and across shared spaces remains a piece of unfinished business.Lacking this crucial capability, many users are reluctant to commit lots of data to their shared spaces. This problem is admittedly hard to solve in a way that doesn't compromise Groove's amazingly robust security. But it's got to be done. Compartmentalization of data within tools, and then within spaces, may be the single factor that most limits Groove's usefulness. The collaborative styles woven into the Groove fabric, such as instant messaging and peer-to-peer sharing, can make IT departments nervous. Industrywide debate continues about how to support these styles in ways that IT can control. Here Groove 2 shines. The product is embedded within a framework that strikes an ideal balance between users' need for freedom and spontaneity, and IT's oversight requirement. The managed entities are user identities, groups, product licenses, devices, and policies governing users, groups, devices. Using a Web-based console, administrators define users and groups, optionally pulling in entries from an LDAP directory. Managed identities defined in this way carry policies, such that a user account may only be used on managed devices, or that a device may only accept downloadable components from an approved location. The resulting profiles can be pushed to clients as e-mail, or made downloadable. We created a managed identity and activated it on our Groove client, where it coexists with a former identity first created in an earlier version The management service, which Groove hosts for customers who buy the Enterprise License Pack, also includes data recovery, reporting, and cross-domain certification. The data recovery feature uses a special digital certificate to ensure that an administrator can reset a pass phrase that's been lost -- which, in Version 1.3, renders any nonsynchronized data unrecoverable. The reporting tool lists the users, spaces, and tools active in a managed domain. It tracks the shared spaces that users create, join, leave, and delete, and the number of minutes they're active both globally and per-tool. Cross-domain certification enables Groove domains to trust one another, so that users need not individually authenticate. Companies that want to control the management service can choose to deploy it in-house. The server is based on IIS and SQL Server, either or both of which may be clustered for high availability. The Groove Relay Server, which provides store-and-forward services for intermittently-connected clients, can also be brought in-house. It doesn't cluster. Instead, a client-side failover strategy is recommended to assure availability. If the Management Server refers to several Relay Servers, managed clients can use any of them. Using Groove 2.0 will be a déjà vu experience for those who have used or managed Lotus Notes. And although Groove becomes more Noteslike in this version, it stays focused on the small teams that are collectively the engine of the knowledge economy. More often than not, these teams transcend companies and their IT infrastructures. Unlike Notes, Groove supports diverse group formation in a fluid and highly secure way.
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