It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

SharePoint Workspace 2010, part of the Office 2010 professional plus edition, is now available! There’s a lot of buzz around the product, not only because it is a major release for former Groove 2007 users, but also because it is the new companion for SharePoint users.

Do you know the product and its features? Do you use it? How?

Answer 6 questions and  let others know what you like, dislike or would like to see in the future releases of SharePoint Workspace!

Microsoft WPC – Worlwide Partners Conference – starts today at New Orleans.  Several major announcements are expected.

At the same time, Microsoft publish several videos dedicated to Office 2010: each product is demoed with its set of new features and improvments. Word 2010, Excel 2010, Access 2010, PowerPoint 2010, Publisher 2010, OneNote 2010, … , and of course SharePoint Workspace 2010!

See What’s New in Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 (Formerly Microsoft Off…

Would like to learn more about Office 2010?

Microsoft launched a new video website to support the 2010 launch campaign : http://www.office2010themovie.com/

Also available,  a blog and a forum dedicated to Office 2010 :

•   http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/
•   http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/office2010general/

Officially published today on a Microsoft blog, Groove 2010 will be renamed SharePoint Workspace 2010 !
This new name confirms the direction that Groove will follow in this major version to come: an advanced integration with Office products and more precisely with SharePoint 2010.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/groove_development_team/archive/2009/05/13/makeover-for-groove-sharepoint-workspace-2010.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

All is said on this drawing: Groove client, Offline support, Cross-firewell support, SharePoint synchronization, Groove Relay Server, Groove Manager, Connection with the PKI, Connection with Active Directory, Groove Databridge as a Backup solution, Groove DataBridge as an integration solution (with SharePoint or other BackOffice applications by using Web Services)

To read : Enterprise Windows | J. Peter Bruzzese | InfoWorld | Getting into the Groove, Part 1: Outsource or in-house? | March 26, 2008 03:00 AM | By J. Peter Bruzzese

As said in a previous posting, I attended today to TechFest2008, a conference where Microsoft Research guys present projects they are working on. After keynotes animated by Craig Mundie and Rick Rashid, we were able to visit several booths and get demonstration on several topics…

My favorites :
- Worldwide telescope : The same approach than Virtual Earth but to discover universe…
- Lucidtouch : A new solution to use UMPC and avoid to have fingers hiding content…
- GeoLife : to combine GPS data with photos on Virtual Earth…
- Collaborative Search : To share search requests with other users…

Few pictures available below…
Enjoy !

     
Keynotes

Worldwide telescope

GeoLife

LucidTouch

Collaborative Search

During a session dedicated to Groove development at Microsoft TechDays – Paris in February, I illustrated my presentation by developing in live an application to manage team tasks. This application enable to create tasks, affect each task to a team member, edit task’s description and status and delete a task when complete. This tasks are displayed on user windows’ desktop as post-it™ and use Groove to store and synchronize data.

With this approach, we are able to create a shared and distributed application, with a “real time” behaviour, and benefit from Groove features : offline access, cross-firewall, easy synchronisation…etc

Few days after this session, I got several feedbacks of Groove users interested by this application. At this stage, it’s only a prototype… but based on user’s feedbacks, i will maybe spend time to work again on this first version to improve it…. 

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.