One of the first questions I get from customers is 'Tell me about the relationship between Groove and Sharepoint. Aren't they just the same thing?' They are certainly related, both being intended for team collaboration, but there are a number of differences and we think that the two tools are complementary, today, and even more so over time.
So what is Groove, anyway? Here’s an overview:
Groove 12 is a collaboration system that allows teams to securely share information and work together on project activities, from simple document collaboration to custom solutions integrated with business processes. Teams using Groove work inside collaborative workspaces, which put all team members, tools and information in context and make it easier to organize and find information. Using peer-to-peer replication, Groove workspaces keep teams up to date automatically and efficiently, and let them work anywhere, anytime, with anyone, so they spend less time coordinating and more time working. There are five core elements to Groove:
- Launchbar—a single starting point for the information worker to monitor all Groove elements including workspaces, contacts, presence, and alerts, and to execute basic functions such as creating new workspaces and communicating with or inviting users.
- Workspaces—containers created by information workers to share information and work together on team projects. Workspaces are kept up-to-date between members through peer-to-peer replication that happens automatically as members make changes to workspace content.
- Presence and Communications—built-in presence awareness, chat and messaging.
- Alerts—text and audible notifications that inform workers of events and changes in ongoing projects.
- Tools—applications added to workspaces by team members for the purposes of sharing and working together on information, both structured (for example, forms) and unstructured (for example, files).
Groove 12 includes the following tools: Discussion, Files, SharePoint Files, Meetings, Calendar, Forms, InfoPath Forms, Issue Tracking, Notepad, Pictures, and Sketchpad.
Those of you familiar with Groove won’t see much of a change between Groove 3.1 and Groove 12. That’s intentional, as we’re largely keeping the product the same and adding Office focused enhancements. The description above can largely be applied to any ‘collaboration system’ for teams, so you might imagine the discussions we’re having about the relationship between Groove and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) team sites.
So, let’s talk about that a bit. As Mike pointed out around the time of the acquisition, the ‘cached mode’ nature of Groove provides the same benefits that it does for work done with Exchange and Outlook. However, for WSS, it’s unlikely that there’s a strict model where you need to bring your entire team site with you all the time. In Groove 3.1, the integration with WSS used that model. For Groove 12, we’ve taken a different approach that we think matches more closely how we think people work as well as being more in-line with the long term direction for WSS and Groove.
Most of the work done in Groove is ‘project focused’ in nature. A subset of a team goes off to update a presentation or create a report, and then they publish it out to the rest of the team. With Groove and WSS, this describes a natural extension of the team site as the hub for all activities, with some of the ‘work’ happening in a Groove workspaces, to be ‘shared’ (when ready for publication or review) with the team in WSS. Taken further, you can see the role that the SharePoint portal plays in rolling up information across teams to give the broader organization a view of activity happening elsewhere in the company.
To this end, we’re deprecating the current Mobile Workspace for Sharepoint template that ships in Groove 3.1 and changing the model to be more focused on bringing the subset of important information from WSS into Groove. In Groove the team uses the workspace to ‘get the work done’, and then that is shared with the team by updating the information back in WSS. The model shifts from ‘site replication’ to ‘list replication’.
For Groove 12 we are introducing a new Sharepoint Files Tool that lets you bring a particular document library or a folder from a document library into Groove. The ability to just synchronize against a particular folder (and it’s sub-folders) is important for sites where there may be one single, large document library for the whole site. If the doc library is organized using folders that map to activities or project teams within the group, it makes for a natural mapping for those teams to be able to bring their content into Groove and work with it locally.
Once the synchronization relationship is established, content is then shared among the other members of the Groove workspace, even if they don’t have access to the WSS site. Files can be ‘checked out’ from Groove against the WSS document library to ensure that the ‘project team’ can lock the document against updates on the server while they are working in the Groove space. Further, files and folders can be added in Groove and those are added to the WSS document library when the workspace is synchronized with the source document library. When you sync, updated content from WSS is also brought automatically into Groove.
This synchronization is either an intentional, manual publishing process, but can also be set up so that the Groove workspace synchronizes at regular intervals with the WSS site.
As you might imagine, it’s our goal over time to introduce additional tools that map to other WSS list types, as well as strengthen the features in Groove that make it a great place for teams to 'work together' using all of the benefits of 'cached mode', with updates automatically pushed to their machine, as well as the affordances of the rich client environment.