It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

I wish you a happy new year 2009!
I hope this new year will bring you joy and sucess, both on personal and professional point of view!
This new starting year is also the right moment to have a look back to 2008!
2008 was indeniably rich in events (TechDays, TechED, TechFest, MVP Summit, Intranet Conference, SharePoint France UG events, Swiss SharePoint UG events), in information about Groove (books, whitepapers, tools templates, press articles), in innovations (evodia, nabaztag, grooveit), in birth  (French Speaking Groove Community), in succès (MVP, Hommes & Process). More than some long sentences, here is a picture that summarizes 2008′s diversity and richness!

Thanks a lot to all people i met or worked with in 2008.
Thank a lot too to all readers of this blog and to people who contribute to it directly or indirectly…

I wish you a year 2009 as rich as 2008!

Finally, for those who do not have ideas regarding their new 2009 resolutions, here is a tool that will indeniably help them: http://resolutionrandomizer.pop.us/ecard.aspx 

SB  Chatterjee, Groove MVP, was speaker last week at the Western Mass .NET Users Group. He provided attendees with a global overview of Groove development capabilities, covering Groove Forms, Web Services, Databridge and SharePoint integration topics.

His presentation is available for download here :

http://weblogs.asp.net/sbchatterjee/archive/2008/12/09/groove-for-developers-in-stereo.aspx

Alistair Speirs, an Office Technology Specialist at Microsoft Australia published few days ago an article called “The Case for Groove“. In this article, he explains why Groove perfectly fits IT requirements and is a perfect solution to enable collaboration in “organisationally, geographically and chronologically dispersed teams“. 
A “must -read”!

As a sumary, Alistair also mention sectors/activities in which Groove is deployed and /or effective in the Asia Pacific : “Emergency services agencies, utilities companies, mining and resources companies, schools, small businesses, mobile sales teams… etc”.   We have quite the same analysis and results here in EMEA.

And I really enjoy his last sentence : “The great thing about Groove is that it solves problems that we never thought we’d be able to solve. That sort of magic is applicable in almost any organisation.”

I really invite you to read his article!

Mary-Jo Foley posted yesterday on the well known “All about Microsoft” ZDNet blog, an article related to Office 14 and focused on the fact that Microsoft currently do not provide a lot of official information about what this new Office version will look like…  In this article, she shortly covered several points : Office Web Application, SharePoint 14, TAP Program, Office Ribbon, etc. One of her points was related to Groove.

She wrote:

“I’ve heard from a couple of sources that SharePoint 14 will include offline access and that this access most likely will be provided via the Groove Networks technology that Microsoft acquired in 2005 when it bought Ray Ozzie’s company. Microsoft has been selling Groove and Groove Services since then, but has done little to tighten the integration between Groove and SharePoint. A recent query for survey participants by Microsoft user-research team shows that Microsoft is definitely interested in this integration”

Like Mary-Jo, I think that a lot of people are looking forward to get Microsoft official information related to Office 14