Today, I had the opportunity to interview Matt Pope, Group Product Manager for Groove at Microsoft. Matt drives the product management and planning for Groove, so he is THE GUY when it comes to talking about Groove. I met Matt in Seattle a few weeks ago and was very excited spend some time with him on the phone.
In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft recently finished the acquisition of Groove Networks. Groove was founded by Ray Ozzie, who was the creator of Lotus Notes. In fact, Ray is now one of Microsoft's three CTO's. What is Groove you might ask?
According to the Groove website, Groove products enable "teams of information workers to securely create and share files, manage projects and meetings, and track data and processes in a highly decentralized manner unconstrained by time, location, or organizational affiliation." I like to think of Groove as a peer-to-peer collaboration tool for cross company or intra-company scenarios. You can use Groove to share files with people at other companies without the complexity of setting up users and trusts in Active Directory or without having to manage user permissions in a Sharepoint site on the extranet. Simply open your Groove workspace, copy a file to it and then send an email to the other person inviting them to "Groove" with you. It's got built in encryption and is network aware so it only replicates the binary deltas of the files you share as they change.
Matt and I talk about the Groove acquisition, the various Groove components and a few of the usage scenarios where Groove might make sense. We also discuss customer references, most of whom were here in the Southeast including Siemens Medical, GlaxoSmithKline, and the State of Florida Department of Emergency Management.
Listen to the Prodcast below and see if it excites you to get your Groove on!
Click to Play Audio (21:44)
WMA Version
For more information about Groove, visit the Microsoft/Groove website.