It’s all about Groove and SharePoint Workspace

Workspace Dashboard: a single place to manage offline and online collaboration with Microsoft Office SharePoint and Microsoft Office Groove. HOMMES & PROCESS is launching a new Groove Workspace solution called Workspace Dashboard. Workspace Dashboard is dedicated to organizing and scheduling team projects within Microsoft Office SharePoint. Using a single dashboard, it also provides a social mapping tool allowing human resources departments to analyze social networks within their organizations. Workspace Dashboard enables the creation of projects sites within SharePoint and can also generate templates for Microsoft® Office Groove® workspaces which will be used to coordinate and standardize online and offline collaboration.

Key benefits:

Online collaboration, or centralized mode, with SharePoint enables:

•  Convenient supervision
•  Usage reporting
•  Project life cycle management

Offline collaboration, or decentralized mode, with Office Groove 2007 enables:

•  Mobile teams collaboration (without or bad internet connection)
•  Agile teamwork – Cross-organization projects
•  Security is always on – encrypted data storage and transfer. 

Workspace Dashboard acts in mixed mode between the online and the offline world, it helps to:

•  Manage data
•  Coordinate centralized and decentralized collaboration
•  Manage mobile and sedentary users.

How does it work?

The main site enables users to search for existing projects and easily view the most recent changes. A collaborator can join a project or create a new one when this is an authorized option. A new project involves the creation of a new SharePoint project site and a new Groove Workspace. The project manager will then be able to invite his/her team members, assign them roles and give them access to the SharePoint site or to the Groove workspace(s) or both. 

Each project site allows working with documents, files and/or business forms. These data are synchronized in the corresponding Groove workspace. Also workspace member management can be handled by project: member invitations, role assignments, project access management. According to the project requirements and defined user rights, a project member can work within the SharePoint project site or within Groove workspaces. When a project has terminated, it can be closed and archived. When needed, a project can be easily restored on request.
 

The Groove workspace reflects the content of the SharePoint site. It enables mobile and offline use. Additional tools are available if needed for mobile users.

The social mapping tool can help Human Resources departments identify the links between users, learn about who is working with whom, view the most successful projects and identify expert profiles within the organization. This kind of valuable information translated into graphical schemes can help make the right decisions when dealing with Human Resources.

 
A capacity planning functionality is available to help managers, analyze application use, plan the resources needed to make it work better and make sure users get the required service level at controlled costs.

To learn more about Workspace Dashboard
SharePoint and Groove users can learn more about Workspace Dashboard functionalities on HOMMES & PROCESS solutions website (lien) http://solutions.hommesetprocess.com. Or ask for personalized information at (lien) http://www.hommesetprocess.com/fr/contact.

If you carefully follow Hommes & Process news, you may already know that the team was finalizing a new product included in the GrooveIT! line.

GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office SharePoint is now available!

What’s that?

 GrooveIT! for Microsoft Office SharePoint is designed to provide SharePoint users with a simple, effective and secure way to extract SharePoint documents and rework them.

By “rework”, I mean: Have the ability to read and modify these documents from outside of SharePoint (so being offline) , the ability to add new resources, but also have the ability to share documents with people outside of the company: customers, partners, etc.

More than a simple download, GrooveIT! for SharePoint uses Groove 2007 functionality to achieve synchronization and security.

How does it work?
 

GrooveIT ! for SharePoint adds a button in your IE toolbar. This button is automatically activated as soon as you navigate to a SharePoint site containing a documents list.
 
Users only need to click the button, choose the source list and a name for the workspace and finally validate. And that’s all! This solution really is “idiot-proof”!
 
SharePoint and BPOS
 
The good news is that GrooveIT ! for SharePoint not only works with corporate SharePoint sites but also support BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) sites. Using GrooveIT! for SharePoint, Groove 2007 become the natural and efficient offline client for your BPOS documents!

2 versions… 2 ways to use it!
 
To comply with corporate policies, GrooveIT! for SharePoint is available in 2 distinct versions.

The first one allows users to extend the workspaces created by GrooveIT! for SharePoint by inviting members or adding new tools.

•  If corporate policies allow invitations to be sent to people outside the company then this approach is the right one to support cross-organization collaboration. It’s a way to extract controlled and limited information from SharePoint and enable a team to work on it.
•  But GrooveIT! for SharePoint also permits users to work with colleagues on the same content in  “draft” mode before publishing finalized versions to SharePoint websites.
•  Finally, GrooveIT! for SharePoint helps mobile workers by providing a way to take documents with them, in a secure and easy way, when they are away from the company.

The second version (called “Special” Edition) ensures that documents stored in SharePoint will not be shared. Workspaces created by GrooveIT! for SharePoint are closed. No one can be invited to these workspaces. This version is the perfect tool to provide users with a secure Offline SharePoint Documents Client!
 
 To learn more…

You will notice that GrooveIT! for SharePoint is completely aligned with Microsoft’s strategy, that plans to link more closely Groove and SharePoint in next year’s major release (Office 2010). Finally, with GrooveIT for SharePoint, Hommes & Process provides you with a kind of preview of what Office 2010 will be made of!
 
You would like to learn more or give GrooveIT! for SharePoint a try?
Please visit: http://solutions.hommesetprocess.com

Microsoft published few days ago a new white paper dedicated to Groove and SharePoint integration. Of course, this paper explain how to use Groove to add Offline experience to SharePoint but also explain benefits provided by Groove to extend SharePoint beyond the Lan (ie, how to provide external users with the ability to access and contribute on Corporate content stored on SharePoint)

This white paper is downlaodable here : Extending SharePoint with Groove collaboration

As a reminder, I also wrote a paper about this topic about 18 months ago.
This paper is available here : Groove and SharePoint : Importance of a common implementation

Do you use SharePoint and work with Groove? Tell us about it and get free software!

Microsoft’s User Research Group is conducting series of studies for SharePoint products and technologies at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA, and is looking for participants in the Puget Sound area. The research team is looking for individuals who use SharePoint at least twice a week and have experience working with Groove. Each participant will receive a gift item they select from a list of some of Microsoft’s most popular hardware and software titles.

If you are interested please email itusable@microsoft.com with your name phone number and insert Groove into the subject line.

You can put me in copy if you find it suitable.

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)

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.

Few weeks ago, I announced GrooveIT! for My Documents Beta Program launch. The Beta program is now closed. The GrooveIT! Team spend time during this period exchanging with Beta testers, collecting their feedback, and trying to integrate their remarks and suggestions into the finale release of GrooveIT! for My Documents.

V1.0 is now available !

As a reminder, GrooveIT! for My Documents is :
- An application to publish into Groove workspaces documents coming from several sources : local file system, sharepoint sites, groove workspaces,
- Some add-ons for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to manage – open and save – documents in Groove directly from within Office tools.
- A search tool to quickly and easily find documents in one or several workspaces

A 30 days free trial is available.
Details and download there : http://www.grooveit.biz

Sorry, this entry is only available in french.