Last fall, I interviewed Matt Pope, who is a Group Program Manager in the Groove division. Microsoft had just acquired Groove Networks and Ray Ozzie had just been named one of our CIO's. Since then, I've become a Groove fanatic. It's such a fantastic tool to collaborate and share documents between companies or teams. I even use it to synchronize data between my home PC and my work laptop. A lot is changing about the product as we get closer to releasing Groove 2007, so I thought it might be time to get an update. I had the opportunity to spend an hour on the phone with Ryan Hoppe who is a Product Manager for the Groove 2007 product and he had a lot to say about the new version.
In the prodcast, Ryan discusses how Groove is more tightly integrated with the other applications in the Office System, such as Office Communicator and presence integration right in Groove workspaces. He also talks about using Infopath forms to capture data between members of a workspace. Ryan reveals how Groove both works with Windows SharePoint Services, as well as stands alone as a great collaboration tool.
Ryan also details the server back-end for Groove 2007 and the components that an enterprise customer would need (relays, managers and data bridges). The data bridge is particularly interesting because it allows Groove users to collect data and automatically push that data into back-end applications such as manufacturing or logistics systems.
If you're not familiar with Groove or would like to hear what's coming in the new release, listen to this prodcast and start "grooving".
Click to Play Audio (35:58)
If you want to learn more about Groove, please visit the Microsoft website.