MICROSOFT AND GROOVE Networks inched a step closer on Monday, announcing plans to integrate Groove Workspace with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services. The goal of the effort is to improve information sharing among project teams that traverse corporate boundaries, according to Microsoft officials.

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The forthcoming Microsoft/Groove team-based collaboration offering will be designed to support online and offline use, provide automatic synchronization, and work securely across corporate firewalls, according to Microsoft officials, in Redmond, Wash.

Groove Networks will deliver the offering in the form of an integration kit that integrates SharePoint Team Services with Groove Workspace by the fall.

The combination of Microsoft's centralized ad-hoc team collaboration and Groove's decentralized model will help meet the varied needs of enterprise workers who are collaborating across multiple activities, according to Dana Gardner, research director at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.

"These two technologies represent both a fully centralized and a fully decentralized approach, which will give people the tools to be more productive across groups," said Gardner.

The addition of Groove's decentralized model, in which collaboration activity is based locally in the client, helps give Microsoft a more complete collaboration solution that lets workers fluidly choose between centralized and decentralized work environments, Gardner added.

To achieve integration with Team Services, one-to-one corollaries were built between Groove tools and Team Services tools, such as documents libraries and discussion boards, according to Andrew Mahon, senior director of product marketing at Groove Networks, in Beverly, Mass.

When an end-user decides to access a SharePoint Team Site through Groove, they can synchronize and take the collaboration offline, he said.

"The benefit of having something on a desktop machine, or you might think of it as a peer, is it gives you the information locally," Mahon said.

Today the integration is forged by writing directly from the Groove toolset to the SharePoint API, he said. Moving forward, SharePoint will expose its functionality as Web services using the .Net model, and vice versa on the Groove side, he said.

This latest product integration follows Microsoft's $51 million investment in Groove last fall, and several cooperative technology development initiatives.

Built on a decentralized platform, Groove's Workspace collaboration product aims to facilitate direct connections between geographically dispersed workers by creating secure, shared workspaces.

The SharePoint Team Services/Groove Workspace integration kit will be available to customers via Groove Networks' distribution channels, the companies said.