Getting into the Groove

With enhanced collaboration tools and ties to enterprise apps, Groove 2 reveals admirable advances in peer-to-peer

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. 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.