The move to Groove: Microsoft cooking up major collaboration plan

A year after buying Groove Networks and its peer-to-peer technology, Microsoft has begun laying out plans to develop the software into the offline client it has been missing in its document collaboration story.

Office Groove 2007, which Microsoft introduced in late February, is being developed as the “cache” or offline client for Microsoft’s Windows SharePoint Services and the renamed SharePoint Server in Office 2007.

The offline capabilities provides corporate users with better support for distributed work teams and mobile workers, who can take work offline much the same way they do with e-mail and then synchronize their changes once re-connected to the network.

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A year after buying Groove Networks and its peer-to-peer technology, Microsoft has begun laying out plans to develop the software into the offline client it has been missing in its document collaboration story.

Office Groove 2007, which Microsoft introduced in late February, is being developed as the “cache” or offline client for Microsoft’s Windows SharePoint Services and the renamed SharePoint Server in Office 2007.

The offline capabilities provides corporate users with better support for distributed work teams and mobile workers, who can take work offline much the same way they do with e-mail and then synchronize their changes once re-connected to the network.

The current SharePoint client is a browser, which means users must be tethered to the network to create or edit any collaborative content.

“This is the most logical thing that they could do with Groove because there is such a significant requirement for an offline store for SharePoint Services,” says Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner. “It is mandatory to be able to take that stuff offline. This is exactly what we had been expecting and were hoping. The only real question is what took them so long.”

Windows SharePoint Services is built into Windows operating system and supports the creation of online team spaces. Those team spaces can be managed and made widely available via SharePoint Server.

“We want to make Groove the rich client for SharePoint complementing the Web interface over time,” says Marc Olsen, group program manager for Groove. He compares the SharePoint client options and the asynchronous capabilities of Groove to Exchange Server clients Outlook and Outlook Web Access. “Outlook is the place for me, Groove is the place for us – the active groups I work with – and SharePoint is the place for them – all the other people I work with,” says Olsen.

The pairing of SharePoint and Groove means Office Groove users or sub-sets of project teams using Groove can check-out documents from SharePoint sites, work on them offline or collaborate on them using Groove, and then synchronize their work with the overall project in SharePoint.

Office Groove also is the place where teams, whether within a company or across companies, can collaborate independent of SharePoint on creating documents using the peer-to-peer connectivity of Groove workspaces, which are kept synchronized on every users desktop using automated replication through a centralized server.

Offline client capabilities are nothing new and have been a feature from the start in the platform of Microsoft’s biggest rival IBM Notes/Domino, which was developed by Groove creator Ray Ozzie, who is now Microsoft CTO.

John Wollman, CTO and executive vice president of Alliance Consulting, an IT consulting firm based in New York City, views the tight integration being built between Groove and Office 2007 as a major boon for team collaboration.

Alliance Consulting users distributed across client project sites and throughout the world have been using Groove since its introduction in 2000 to collaborate on creating documents or other content Wollman generically calls artifacts.