Getting into the Groove

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.

Perhaps the most compelling new capability is real-time viewing and editing of Word or PowerPoint documents. The feature is available from the Files tool, which manages conventional documents within a Groove shared space. When a member of a space selects a Word document in the Files tool, a button labeled Start Co-Edit becomes active, with which members can invite other members into a co-editing session. The default mode is co-review. In this mode, all users are active in the document, and all actions are echoed everywhere.

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.

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.

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.