Groove upgrades collaboration suite
Users have greater access to e-mail and calendar items
Follow @infoworldGroove Networks Wednesday announced an upgraded version of its collaboration platform that gives users broader access to e-mail and calendar items and gives network executives more tools to manage Groove users' profiles and bandwidth consumption.
For end users' convenience, Groove Workspace 2.5 features tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook and new tools for working with Microsoft's collaboration suite, SharePoint Team Services.
In the old version, users working within the Microsoft Outlook client could forward e-mail messages and attachments to create a new collaborative workspace in Groove. In version 2.5, users can now forward Outlook messages and attachments to existing Groove workspaces as well.
Users also can now swap calendar items, so they don't have to maintain separate scheduling applications. The standard edition of Groove Workspace 2.5 lets users send Outlook calendar entries to Groove project calendars. The professional version adds the ability to do the reverse: Users can publish Groove calendar entries to their Outlook calendars.
"People live in their Outlook calendars," says Donna Carvalho, senior product manager for Groove Workspace. This integration between the two programs lets users see their Groove schedules from within the same calendar they always use, she says. If a Groove calendar entry is modified, the software automatically sends the revised schedule information to Outlook.
Also new to the suite is Groove Mobile Workspace for Microsoft SharePoint. This add-on is aimed at companies that have deployed Microsoft's collaboration platform. It gives these users offline access to SharePoint data, and a means to work with users who reside outside company firewalls. SharePoint is designed for internal corporate users who have Web access; typically, SharePoint users can't work offline or share information across corporate boundaries, Carvalho says.
Groove Mobile Workspace for Microsoft SharePoint allows users to move their SharePoint data into a Groove workspace. It also provides synchronization capabilities so that data that's been added on the SharePoint side will be automatically added to the Groove workspace, and vice versa.
New file-sharing features improve performance by giving users greater control over what files they receive, and when, Carvalho says. With the old version, if someone put a file in a shared workspace, everyone in the workspace would receive a copy of the file -- whether they needed it or not. With version 2.5, users receive a message with a link when a person posts a file; they can choose to download the file or not, Carvalho says.
For IT administrators, Groove Workspace 2.5 includes enhancements to Groove's Enterprise Server family of products.
