It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

If you are in the L.A area this week, visit TechED US on friday and attend Yung Chou’s session called “Prototyping Microsoft Office Groove Collaboration Solutions with a Laptop “. Visit Yung Chou’s blog to get more details.

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

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)

TechED Developers Barcelona is now started…

More than a long speech, few images :

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.

From Nov 10th to Nov 14th, I will be at Barcelona for Microsoft TechED.

Like last year, you will be able to find me on the Groove booth.

I will also be speaker on a session dedicated to Groove.

Here is the abstract :

How to extend and integrate Groove

This session will provide attendees with a global overview of available methods to extend Groove capabilities. Using Forms, we will explain how to create customized applications for your Groove workspaces. We will also explain how to integrate Groove with external applications such as SharePoint or to create secured distributed applications. The session will be illustrated by several demos…Some of them will be Business oriented, others will be more playful!  

TechED 2007 is now closed… It was a really great opportunity to meet Microsoft experts working on several technologies and discuss with customers and developers about Groove technologies…
 
See you next year at Barcelona

As said in a previous post, a training dedicated to Groove was planned on Sunday 11th and located in an hotel closed to CCIB. A great opportunity for about 30 attendees to discover Groove technologies. The training covered several items from basics – usages, client configuration and features – to advanced topics such as architecture, Groove domain management, or enterprise deployment.

As said in a previous post, I demoed last Wednesday GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office Outlook Release 2 during the session dedicated to Groove development.
 
Demonstration use case:

I just received an email from one of my customer asking me to start a new project with him and who would like to set up a collaboration workspace to share project documents and follow-up. Using GrooveIT for Microsoft Office Outlook, in Outlook, i click on the “Send to Groove” button, choose a Groove identity. I can then choose an existing workspace or create a new one. As we are starting a new project, I decide to create a new workspace. I enter a name and choose emails recipients I would like to invite to join this new workspace. I’m also able to select contacts coming from my Contacts list in Outlook. I then customize invitation text and validate. A new workspaces is automatically created, invitations to join are sent by email to selected contacts and 2 new tools are added to my workspace : The first one will be dedicated to emails management – threads of discussions, filtering… – and the second one will allow me to store attachments. I finally choose attachments I would like to publish and validate.
That’s all it take!…
In few seconds, I new workspace dedicated to my project is ready to be used…
 
As i guess I will probably receive other emails related to this project, I aslo choose to create a

GrooveIT! rule. A create an Outlook folder and launch the “New GrooveIT! rule” wizard to map this folder to a Groove workspace. When new emails will arrive in my Inbox, I will only need to drop them into my mapped Outlook folder to have them automatically sent to Groove.
 
Finally, I would like to share some news related to a specific technology and useful for my new project. I subscribed to a RSS feeds in Outlook. I create a GrooveIT! rule to automatically publish new RSS articles into my workspace. Only few clics to transform my personal competitive watch to a team one!

If you would like to discover extra use cases or give a free trial to GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office Outlook, visit GrooveIT! website

You will also find below few photos taken during the presentation (Thanks to Nay for these photos)

Jim Moffat, from ElasticTime (UK), was also on the Groove both this week. What you maybe do not know is that Jim is the creator and administrator of GrooveUser.org, a community website dedicated to Groove.Visit this site to discover resources, blogs, “country forums”, etc…
 
And congrats Jim for these great idea !