Jaa

The Groove Virus

  • Artikkeli

OK relax, this is not a post about some new STD you need to protect yourself from. Although while I'm on the subject, was it really necessary for the Microsoft Well Being centre to advertise their free clamidia screening service by sticking rough paper notices to the mirrors in all the toilets on campus?

No I'm talking about what I'm noticing about the spread of Groove - our new tool for virtual teams which features in the new Enterprise Edition. Groove is changing the way we work in a more radical way than the introduction of SharePoint did to email usage. 

I run my launch team for 2007 using Groove. Everyone shares the same set of documents, the same issue list, discussions etc wherever they are, online or offline. I can see how the project is taking shape as the plans evolve. Groove can include people not in the firewall too so I'm adding key external people to the workspace too so they can join in. I can see who's online and who is in the workspace at the moment - even how many are in each tab. 

But its the viral nature of Groove that is really interesting me. When I told the team, if you want to see what's going on you need to install Groove Beta1TR and join the workspace I got a mix of reactions. Some were up for it - always looking to try out the new stuff, some were more "yeah ok whatever, add it to my todo list", and some were downright obstreporous (you know who you are). However, they did it and once they did, everyone, even the reluctant ones, started to think "hey this is really great and much easier than using SharePoint alone". Of course then, they set up their own virtual teams and went through the same reaction range with their team. I'm now observing this happening across the company with 3rd generation Groove converts starting to preach the gospel. 

Virtual teaming crosses internal departmental boundaries and also company boundaries as we work with customers, partners, agencies and suppliers. As people realise just how powerful Groove is, expect to find it spreading very rapidly by word of mouth. Groove is best experienced and because peer to peer collaboration tools are not that common, it can take some getting your head round. What I am observing though is that you don't need to be a teckie geek to love Groove or understand it, you just need to try it as part of a team to become an advocate. 

It's very important to understand Groove and also OneNote in 2007 because these are the additional products in the Enterprise sku. Volume licencing customers under Enterprise Agreements or Software Assurance will transition from Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 to the new Professional Plus 2007 edition. From there we will have step-ups to the new enterprise edition for those highly collaborative workers. We expect these people to be highly mobile, probably travelling a lot - big offline requirement therefore, working on many virtual teams etc. A strong target audience for TabletPCs too. Some companies who have a highly evolved collaboration culture may want everyone on this edition whilst others will only want a subset of their users to have it. 

So watch out for Groove, I'm sure it won't be long before someone near you catches the "bug".

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2007
    We continue the roadshow in Harrogate yesterday but this posts covers questions I made a note of to look