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Deploying Groove Server 2007 and Groove 2007 at Microsoft

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Executive Summary

At Microsoft, as in many organizations, the majority of collaborative work occurs in small teams. In today's highly distributed and decentralized business environment, teams span multiple locations, organizations, and time zones. Also, the workforce has become more mobile than ever. It has become increasingly more challenging for team members to effectively work together on projects, share information, and maintain a high level of productivity.

Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007 is a new collaboration tool in the 2007 Microsoft Office system that increases individual and team productivity by enabling teams to dynamically work together on projects, even when team members work for different organizations, work remotely, or work offline. The Groove 2007 platform employs a unique decentralized, hybrid architecture. Core components are decentralized client software (Groove 2007) and server software that provides services to Groove clients (Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Groove Enterprise Services).

Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) partnered with the Office product group to deploy Groove 2007 within Microsoft. The primary goal of the project was to establish an on-site server infrastructure based on Groove Server 2007 from which to support dynamic team collaboration for 60,000 Groove 2007 users in the enterprise. The Microsoft IT deployment of Groove 2007 was an opportunity to increase individual and team productivity by helping employees to bridge boundaries, collaborate on projects more efficiently, and engage partners and customers more effectively.

With the Groove 2007 infrastructure in place, Microsoft IT is currently overseeing the internal worldwide deployment of the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of the Groove 2007 client (as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007). As of January 2007, more than 45,000 users at Microsoft have installed Office Enterprise 2007 on more than 78,000 computers. Of these, 14,000 users have active Groove user accounts.

As the first pre-release customer of Groove 2007, Microsoft IT played an important role in helping to validate the business value and IT benefit gained from a large enterprise-wide deployment in addition to helping to improve and shape the final configuration of the product. During this process, Microsoft IT learned many valuable lessons and developed best practices that provide meaningful guidance to other organizations that want to deploy and manage a Groove 2007 infrastructure to enable dynamic team collaboration.

This paper shares Microsoft IT's early-adopter experiences in the deployment of Groove 2007 at Microsoft, with a focus on the on-site server architecture. The information shared in this paper captures early-stage discoveries and learnings to date. It is intended for technical decision makers, business decision makers, and IT architects. The Microsoft IT deployment plan included tasks that other organizations may never encounter or that may need to be completed at different times. Therefore, although this paper provides recommendations based on Microsoft IT's experiences, it is not intended to serve as a procedural guide. Because each enterprise environment has unique circumstances, each organization should adapt the information in this paper to meet its own specific requirements.

Read all the Technical Document here: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase/content/groove2007.mspx

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