It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

Thursday, April 17th. Seattle WA. Last day of the MVP 2008 Global Summit…

Keynotes were presented by Toby Richards, MVP Program General Manager, Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, and Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, at Microsoft Corp. Each presentation was followed by a set of Q/A. And this year the main topic was : Groove – SharePoint. Up to 5 MVP’s questions were dedicated to the topic : Groove as offline client for SharePoint, Groove as a development platform for distributed applications, Groove with SharePoint, Groove without SharePoint, etc…

Extract from Ray Ozzie’s presentation transcript :

QUESTION: Hi. Thank you. I really have a question about a product you actually might know pretty well, and that product is called Groove. Perhaps.

RAY OZZIE: I do know a little bit about that.

QUESTION: Now, there’s another product within Microsoft that’s been pretty successful in the last year called SharePoint. (Cheers.)

My question is — yeah, SharePoint. My question is, is Groove the future UI for SharePoint, because that would be just — when you talk about your software as a service and talk about exposing services in new ways and in new UIs, there’s a lot of overlap there? It seems like Groove really ought to be the way to leverage SharePoint on the desktop. (Applause.)

RAY OZZIE: The word that you said, “overlap,” I like to think of as complementary. (Laughter.)

You asked if Groove is the future UI of SharePoint. I might ask the same thing, is SharePoint the future UI of Groove.

Groove is really, really specialized and does a really great job in terms of dynamic collaboration between individuals. That is the design center. It just executes that extremely well.

SharePoint is a great thing at the center in terms of a place — it’s kind of the new file system, the new age file system where we had file shares before; now we’re posting them and kind of up-leveling the conversation that happens around those things in the repository.

They are very, very complementary, and you will see in 14 and beyond increasing association with the things that you can do in SharePoint, and the things that you can do with Groove and the client, increasing levels of connections, both specific functions of the UI that are designed to work seamlessly with one another, increasingly the semantics underneath being brought together and so on.

So, it’s a good observation, and, yes, that is the strategy.

Extract from Steve Ballmer’s presentation transcript : 

QUESTION: First, thanks for this. At your presentation in Bombay last year in November, I followed up your keynote with a presentation of Groove. I think, as anyone observed, the people who were most excited were actually Microsoft people themselves. So I have both a suggestion, as well as a question. The suggestion is, please don’t dilute Groove as a platform in its own right. It has a value not necessarily dependent on SharePoint or anything else.

Very often Groove is a much easier entry point into an organization. It’s also a phenomenal platform on which to build real-world applications, and I’m talking of distributed ERP, point of sales systems, and a lot of things that benefit from the security, reliability, and the ease of use of Groove, which brings me to my question. What can we as MVPs do to vitalize Groove within Microsoft?

STEVE BALLMER: Well, Groove is an important product now. If you take a look at it I’d say probably the acquisition we did of Groove was one of the top five largest acquisitions the company has ever done. And, yet, I hear what you’re saying. If everybody at Microsoft used Groove every day, maybe in every application  I use Groove, but I’m not a daily user, I’m more of a weekly-type user than a daily-type user. I’ll talk to Ray and we’ll give it some thought, which probably would involve doing things for the bootstrap. People have their ways of working, to take one of our important internal applications, and improve it through the use of Groove, so I’ll take that as a good suggestion and take it up.

QUESTION: Thank you. (Applause.)

 I have my own opinion regarding Groove and SharePoint complementary : There’s a full set of scenarii on which Groove and SharePoint take a real advantage to be used together. I often spend time during conferences on which I’m speaker, explaining these scenarii. It’s a point on which both SharePoint users and Groove users have questions, need answers and concrete illustrations of value-added usages.

I wrote a short white paper on this topic about 1 year ago. I’m currently working on a more advanced version of this document but the first version can be downloaded there : Groove and SharePoint : The importance of common implementation.

More than the current integration between Groove and SharePoint, MVP Summit was also a good opportunity to have a look to the future. Without providing any confidential information, what I can say is that Groove 14 and SharePoint 14 will work together in a closer manner than today. while keeping the well know cross-organization secured P2P approach. Based on our requests, we can also hope to have GWAPI (the well known Groove API available in the first versions of Groove and used to develop custom applications based on Groove infrastructure) back in the future releases of Groove.

This Summit was a real opportunity for Groove MVPs and Groove community to demonstrate their enthusiasm and faith in this wonderful product : Groove…. 

And, having a look to articles published on Internet after the event, it was also a real good opportunity to create buzz around Groove !

Related postings :

- Does Microsoft have a gameplan for Groove? (ZD NET – Mary Jo Foley)

- Will SharePoint Gain Tighter Bonds With Groove? (InternetNews.com – Stuart J Johnston)

- Ray Ozzie: Microsoft 2008 Most Valuable Professional Global Summit

- Steve Ballmer: Microsoft 2008 MVP Summit