Groove - Sharepoint's Cool Brother?

Know More: Applications, Central Desktop, Collaboration, Microsoft, Ray Ozzie, SharePoint, VoIP 2.0, Applications

Microsoft's Groove 2007 is in Beta and I'm taking advantage of the 60 day trial to test it out. Groove is a workspace collaboration tool that works pretty much like every other tool. Much easier and more intuitive than Sharepoint, the documentation says that the more advanced versions of Groove access Sharepoint, working as the front end. I'm not totally sure what that means.

Groove is unique in that it is downloaded to your own computer. It interfaces with a server to save changes to the workspace, but the actual interface resides on each computer. Their introduction touts awareness (being able to see other group members online status), work anywhere, and sharing information.

Things I like: The interface is clean and intuitive. The "navigate together" and "browse together" features are nice - one member controls the navigation, which the others can watch. Chat and VOIP is also available (although I didn't test the VOIP). There is a large number of tools that you can use in your workspace including:

File sharing
Discussions (forums)
Photo and image sharing
Calendar which integrates with Outlook
Meeting Planner
Notepad
Project Manager
Sketchpad (a kind of whiteboard)
Web Link sharing
Document review (members make document edits which are then all combined into one new document)
Forms/Databases
The ability to build your own tools

I also like the fact that you pay a one-time price (about $70 - $230 per computer) to purchase the software, instead of getting dinged each month...however, it wasn't clear about the use of the server for the sharing - is there a monthly fee for that?

Not much I actively don't like at this point - I may discover more once I delve into it further. If you can browse/navigate together, why can't you use a pointer as well to highlight parts of browsed pages.

I guess at this point I don't see a killer reason to choose Groove over another application, such as Central Desktop, which I reviewed earlier this week. If you're from the Groove team and beg to differ, let me know and we can set up a time to talk about it.

» Groove - Sharepoint's Cool Brother? from VoIPBlogging
[Source: DoRealTime - Real Time Collaboration] quoted: Groove is a workspace collaboration tool that works pretty much like every other tool. Much easier and more intuitive than Sharepoint, the documentation says that the more advanced versions of... [Read More]

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It looks like the "ultimate" version of Office 2007 is going to have a heavy price tag - around US$650 for the stand-alone and around $500 for an upgrade. What will this get you? Quite a bit, but I doubt... [Read More]

Great good knowledgebase.
But i have a question regarding that does groove support windows authentication.
i am talking about groove 2007.
please please tell me in detail..
its my last hope

Posted by: Intekhab | June 2, 2006 4:44 AM | Permalink to Comment

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