It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

Few weeks ago, Hommes & Process released a new GrooveIT! product : GrooveIT! for My Calendars. This product is designed to provide users with a single consolidated view of several Groove calendars. User can choose which calendar he would like to add in his view, choose a specific color for each calendar, and also add new information to a calendar event (such a location, people involved…) and benefits from reminders and filters.

The good news is that an Outlook connector is now released!
You are now able to add your Outlook calendars in this single consolidated view!

You would like to give it a try? Visit : http://www.grooveit.biz

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

As already said in a previous posting, I attended to a Swiss SharePoint Club meeting at Vevey in Switzerland few days ago. This meeting was for me an opportunity to demo Groove and explain its complementarities with SharePoint in the morning, but also to animate a Groove workshop during the afternoon. Based on an open discussion / Q-A spirit, we covered several topics related to Groove technologies : uses cases, architecture, extension capabilities, philosophy…etc
This discussion was really dynamic ! Thanks to all attendees !

During this day I also discussed with Laurent Dieterich, community’s founder and main actor…
A sincere thank to him for his warn welcome !

Have a look to pictures taken by Laurent durant this day and published on Flickr : 2008-06 Swiss SharePoint Club in Vevey – a set on Flickr

During the last 2 days, I was at Paris, training Microsoft Partners on Groove technologies. This training was split in 2 parts : The first one was dedicated to sales people (Use Cases, Value-added, etc). The second one was dedicated to technical guys and more precisely  designed to help attendees to prepare and get Groove 70-555 certification.

It was an opportunity for me to use my new “Groove Monster” demo laptop

A laptop running Win2008, Active Directory, SQL Server 2008 (*) and HyperV (**)
+ a VPC on Win2008 hosting Groove Audit/Manager Server and Groove Relay Server (***)
+ a VPC on Win2003 hosting Groove DataBridge Server
+ 2 VPC to simulate clients (1 Vista / 1 XP)

A great architecture to demo and explain the whole Groove architecture !

(*) Groove Server Manager is not supposed to run with SQL Server 2008
(**) Groove Servers on HyperV (or VMWare) at this stage are for demo/prototype usage only. Do not use virtualized Groove servers for production purposes.
(***) Groove Manager Server and Groove Relay Server as not supposed to be hosted on the same physical computer