It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Few weeks ago, Don Dogde published an interresting article on his blog related to Contacts, Social Networks, Email and Collaboration. In a part of this article, he explained why users “love” emails and used it to communicate and… collaborate.

Based on my own experience, but also based on Groove users’ feedbacks, i think that both emails and collaboration tools like Groove are useful but are not designed to achieve the same goal /usage. Here is the comment I posted on Don’s post… Of course, do not hesitate to provide me with your own opinion and comments…

Hi Don,

You said : ” (…) The problem is that people LOVE email (…)”

I would not say people love emails. I think they are used to emails. They are maybe not aware that it exists other means to communicate and collaborate.

Taking this situation into consideration, the following asumption is right :

“Email is where people naturally communicate and collaborate.”

As soon as they become aware they can use other tools (such as Groove that you mentionned) it becomes the favourite place to collaborate with their trusted business environment. Emails become a second choice to communicate with people who do not have (yet) access to these “advanced tools”

Regarding your comment on Groove / Collaboration, I agree that email is the right place to *start* a collaboration. It is the right place to intiate a contact, to be recommended to a prospect, to qualify an opportunity… In short, to go from a “I do not know this person” state to a “We have to work together” one…

When you need to work efficiently with another person or a team, email does not fit collaboration requirements:

- It is not enough business oriented : When I need to concentrate on business, I do not want to waste time sorting each email to check which one is a businness emails, which one is a spam, which one is private, which one may contains a virus…etc…
What I need is a “high level email” dedicated to business : When I get an secured instant message, I know for sure that it is related to my projects, my company…etc coming from well know persons…

- It is not enough secured : Security and trust are the 2 main requirements for a productive collaboration. Are you really ready to share confidential data through email? What I need is a system that ensure intellectual property protection, access control, strong user authentification…

- It is not enough “contextual” : When you would like to collaborate, you need to store in a single place all information dedicated to a project : actions to be done, documents generated as a result of these actions, communications archiving…etc
Email do not allow you to do that… Of course, you are able to store all your emails in a folder, but what about documents library, discussions, forms…all these pieces of data useful to achieve a project.

- There’s no reference : When you use email to review documents, how do you manage versions… After several revisions, it becomes difficult to know who really has the right and final version…
And of course, with each email, the document is sent again and again… No reference, no known repository, a lot of bandwith used to sent each modification to each participant…

As you know, Groove provides every single user with all these features.

As a summary, I would say that emails and collaboration tools such as Groove and Outlook are both useful and provide a real complementarity. The most important, according to me, is to have a bridge between these 2 differents tools : Have a look to GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office Outlook to see what I mean. (http://www.grooveit.biz/en/foroutlook)

NB : I regret we did not get the chance to meet. I am working on Groove technologies for a while. (Groove Developer Partner since 2002, Groove SVAR since 2003, and now Microsoft Gold Certified Partner since Groove Networks was bought by Microsoft in 2005.) (More details on http://www.hommesetprocess.com)