It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

Attending TechED is a right opportunity to do a web review and list new articles published on Internet and related to Groove. Of course, most of these items will / would be covered during the session dedicated to Groove next Friday. (As a reminder, for TechED attendees : Friday14th – 9 AM – Room #131 : “How to extend and integrate Groove”)

- Matt Shanon wrote an article related to InfoPath integration with Groove : In this article, he explains all required steps to prepare an InfoPath Form to be injected in a Groove workspace:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd185656.aspx

- You use Groove Forms or InfoPath Forms. Read this article to learn how to improve Forms Performance. This article was written by Josh Goldman:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc984181.aspx

- Also, this very interesting article regarding Groove and Sharepoint integration issues:
http://blogs.technet.com/weeklygroove/archive/2008/11/10/understanding-and-troubleshooting-the-sharepoint-files-tool-in-groove-2007.aspx

- And also this video by Ian White and Mark Ryan, explaining how to use Groove to improve network security and operationnal effectiveness:
Use Groove to improve Network Security and Operationnal effectiveness 

- Finally, my colleague and friend, Jean-Michel Davault, is finalizing a book about Groove. Have a look to his blog. At this stage, the book is available in French but is currently being translated:
http://jeanmicheldavault.blogspot.com/2008/11/microsoft-office-groove-la-confiance.html

As already said in a previous posting, I will be next week, from Nov 10th to Nov 14th, at Barcelona at TechED Developer. If you would like to meet, I will spend most of my time on the Office booth. On Friday, I will also be speaker on a session dedicated to Groove : “How to integrate and extend Groove”. It will cover all capaibilities provided by the Groove 2007 platform to create custom applications or integrate with other BackOffice systems. It will be also a great opportunity to demo NabazGame and NabazGroove.

In last june, I wrote a first article for IT PRO Magazine. This first one was an introduction to Groove (What Groove does, How it works…etc). 

A new article dedicated to Groove and SharePoint is now available in the October Edition. It covers both technical (how) and fonctionnal (why) aspects of integration between this 2 products

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

Microsoft published few days ago a document describing how Groove can be used to improve post-merger integration process. The author highlight issues usually encountered….

Here are 2 interesting quotes :

“   The post-merger integration planning team must work with the deal team to understand the projected synergies, and then create a road map to achieve them. This task is challenging because employees from the merging companies may be located in multiple geographic regions and work on separate networks. Integration team members cannot share documents and information through their network and often must depend on e-mail to work collaboratively.
Collaborating via e-mail and sending highly valuable, business-critical documents raises serious security concerns, including the potential loss of intellectual property. Recent research in high-tech manufacturing has shown that close to 80 percent of workers have used nonsecure public communications tools to collaborate with partners, and only 27 percent of business users and 37 percent of technical decision makers surveyed consider their collaboration tools to be “definitely” secure.  “

 and

” The acquiring company often has a standard plan for post-merger communication, but in almost all cases, effective internal communication requires collaboration between management, human resources, and other departments of both companies.
With so many internal decisions to be made and a significant amount of time spent communicating with employees, some companies going through post-merger integration lose focus on their external communication to customers, clients, vendors, the community, and the media. As with internal communication, it is critical for the management of the two companies to work together to effectively communicate to its external stakeholders and customers.  “

And, of course, this document also describe benefits provided by Groove to improve team collaborative in this context.

Spend few minutes to read this document…
It’s very interesting!

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.

A lot of good news in the GrooveIT! line for the end of this year…

A new product in the GrooveIT! line…

GrooveIT! for MyDocs will be available in the coming weeks. Dedicated to documents integration with Groove, this new product will allows you to easily find documents wherever they come from, preview and publish them in Groove workspaces. All will be done in a few clicks… If you are interested by this product you can now subscribe to join the Beta program.

A new major release for GrooveIT! for Outlook…

Maybe do you already know GrooveIT! for Outlook, solution dedicated to data export from Outlook to Groove. A new major release (V2) is available since the end of last week !

It is now possible to send emails, tasks, calendars, RSS feeds and contacts from Outlook et Groove workspaces. The publication can be done “on demand” or automatically by creating GrooveIT! rules (Mapping between an Outlook folder and a tool in a Groove workspace). The product support updates for contacts, tasks and calendars : every modification done in Outlook is reported in Groove. Groove tools provided with GrooveIT! have also been improved. You can now benefits from sort, filter, Groove links support (For example, to link an email and an attachment published in 2 different tools). Emails discussion threads are also supported.

Items provided above are just some examples.

There’s a lot of surprises to discover in GrooveIT!

A trial version is available for free… Give it a try…

But be careful : try it and you will adopt it…. 

A new website and a new blog…

To launch these 2 new products, GrooveIT! website was totally redesigned. More than product information, you will find testimonials and video demos…You can also visit GrooveIT! blog to stay up-to-date and benefits from news and tips.

To visit !

I wrote several months ago an article related to Groove and SharePoint integration scenarii.
This article can be downloaded here.