A “Top-tip”!  If you are travelling to Munich and don’t have business in the city centre; book in at the Kempinski Hotel at the airport.  It’s a 5 minute walk once you clear customs and a very nice hotel. It’s one of those “need to know” places like the Hilton Airport Hotel at Copenhagen or at Schipohl, Amsterdam.  I don’t know about you, but I like to arrive in the evening before a customer engagement, and walk to my hotel!  No muss no fuss!  

Today I had a lot of questions from multi-national companies, considering Groove.  The questions are always around the same themes; which is good for me, and Microsoft, they tend to gravitate around the same questions:  “How do I back-up Groove workspaces in an Enterprise environment?”, “What can I do ‘out of the box’ with Groove and SharePoint?” and, if I have decided to host my own Groove server infrastructure – how do I make that secure?”  

Today we published a few, new, whitepapers (see the links above) to give some detailed information about the options, and choices, you have when thinking about deploying Microsoft Office Groove 2007.  

I was very happy to hear from a customer today the following remark: “There is strong move in the corporate IT world to SOA, which is supported by the various Agile methodologies (Project Management and Programming), which call for a "Bullpen" like working environment. In companies such as ours it is impossible to create physical Bullpens, but the combination of WSS, Groove, Office 2007 and Live Server with all its goodies, creates a very juicy virtual Bullpen.”  

When I read this kind of feedback, I get very happy because I realise that our customers are starting to see the value of the “Microsoft Stack” in dealing with the demands that their business communities are placing on them.   It’s rewarding when you feel that “the planets are lining up” and folks are starting to see the added value that they can experience when they buy into to the bigger Microsoft picture!

 

"What I am looking for is Compete material of Groove vs. Documentum E-Rooms”  

This was a question I had in my in-box this morning! A MSFT colleague, who clearly has been confused by their customer is getting dragged down into a “rat-hole”, where the customer, equally un-researched, is trying to compare Documentum eRooms to Groove!  OK; so the first thing I did was to go to the EMC2 website and understand what “Documentum eRooms” actually do!  

From their website: 

“EMC Documentum eRoom provides a rapidly deployed and easily adopted Web-based collaborative workspace that enables distributed teams to work together more efficiently. Project teams around the world can accelerate and improve the development and delivery of products and services, optimize collaborative business processes, improve innovation, and streamline decision-making.

eRoom is flexible and easily configurable, allowing users to customize and use their collaborative workspaces to support a wide range of business processes” 

So, having read this, I am immediately concerned that my colleague has missed a big trick!  In the first sentence above, they speak of a “web-based collaborative workspace”.  This should be "end of story" while trying to understand where Groove plays against this type of solution – It doesn’t!!  Realistically MOSS is the competitor in this scenario, not Groove.  Groove is not a “web-based collaborative workspace”!  It is entirely client based; there is no centralised data store and consequently; nowhere to hit with a web-browser!   

I am sure that EMC Documentum eRoom is a great product – but it does not solve the problem that Groove solves: "How do I work off-line with various collaborators and synch up when I get back on line"?  We are back to the same discussion that we had a week ago when I discussed the differences between MOSS and Groove.    

Groove 101:  When you want to/need to work “offline” with a group of people from different organisations and don’t want to wait for IT to configure an “Extranet application” – there is nothing like Groove!  

You cannot use Documentum eRooms on a plane or anywhere where you have no Internet access!  This is where Groove fills a "missing link".  If you travel a lot, like I do, suddenly you see that all of these "Big, centralised, datacentre solutions" have a difficiency:  They are great if you "live on the LAN" but many people don't.  

If you want to find out more about Groove check out our new MSDN site:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb308957.aspx 

 

Of late I have seen a strange influx of customer, and MSFT employee, enquiries as to future developments in Microsoft Office and Groove, in particular.  While some of the requests for functionality, wrapped in the veneer of enquiry, are fascinating, and will definitely inform our internal design philosophy; some of them are plainly “wishful thinking”!  

There are basically only a few successful ways to develop software on a commercial basis.  “Build it and they will come”, is one way to do it: Meaning you focus on a neat idea that is innovative and offers new value to the community, think of Lotus 123 or U-Tube.  Alternatively you could elect to build your software product based on user feedback, through focus groups etc.  Or any combination of these two.  

I have a big problem with the pure “focus group” option, as it has been my experience that the members of focus groups tend to “fib”; tell you what they think you want to hear or influence the more submissive members of the focus group.  I can hear the marketing people screaming now!! Maybe this works for concepts like “Brand” or “Dishwasher” but believe me, it doesn’t work for software development!

During the time I worked for Lotus Development, I noticed that customers would complain that there were too many menu options and that the software was too complicated:  These were the same customers who, over the previous 5 years, had lobbied for all of these features and menu options!  I am not blaming them.  

When, at Microsoft, we started to build Microsoft Office 2007 we looked at the “Top 100” feature requests and discovered that those features already existed!!  Go Figure!  

Allow me to go “off piste” here for a bit!  For some reason I am minded of the famous, some would say - infamous, anthropologist, Margaret Mead.  Margaret Mead created a great controversy in the mid 20^th Century due to the fact that she was open to accusations of allowing her own feelings about how “life should be” to colour her investigations into her research of the native people of Samoa.  

Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist followed up on her work and the “gist” of his findings was that poor Margaret had been systematically lied to by her Samoan interlocutors, who apparently liked the attention and “free stuff” that Margaret provided.  They made up stories that they thought she would like to hear!!  I think that focus groups can work like that.  What I find more amusing is that customers often ask us for features that are often in the realms of science fiction!   

Here is a catalogue of the more “extreme requests”, and my PERSONAL response (Not to be confused with responses from Microsoft Corporation, which are definitive – my opinion is not):  

1.      “When will Groove give me “Off-line” SharePoint?”

a.     – As I understand it we at MSFT want to make Groove a really “cool-tool” to use with SharePoint; but if you think that we will enable you to take your 30GB site "off-line" and have it all work like it does while “on-line”, then thinj again, as we probably won’t be doing that in the foreseeable future!  Right now Groove offers some tremendous capabilities that nothing else does!  It can do this because it is not “yoked” to a centralised “mega system” and therefore can allow you to be agile in your ad-hoc collaboration.  Out of the box you get a nifty tool that enables you to take MOSS libraries, folders and documents off line to share outside of your LAN!  That is truly powerful.  It takes a few mouse clicks to get “grooving” with someone outside your org while it might take days, or weeks to configure a MOSS extranet.  

2.     “When will Groove allow me to do record locking – so I don’t get editing conflicts?”

a.     The answer is – “when we invent Quantum computing!”  While this request is frequent, it is impossible, due to the laws of Physics.  Think about this scenario:  Bob and Mary are members of a Groove workspace.  Bob puts a Word document into the files tool and asks Mary to make some edits.  Mary downloads the doc and goes off line and gets on a plane to go somewhere.  While she is on the plane, Bob elects to apply the “fictional”, “Document Lock” and starts editing.  Here is what would happen.  Mary gets off of the plane and eventually connects to the Internet, when she does this her Groove client contacts her Relay Server and en-queues and de-queues her “deltas”.  All is good!  BUT while she is sending the edits that she has made, while off-line , she gets the “delta” that says “Lock that document”. Now her document is locked from editing.  BUT, while she was receiving the “lock” instruction, she sent all the changes that she had made off-line to Bob; who now has a bunch of changes that he could not stop as they were made before he issued the “lock” command.   This of course is all fictional, a mind-experiment to help you understand why we can’t do “record locking” in a distributed system.  Trekkies line up and proove me wrong! 

3.     “Why can’t I use Windows Desktop Search to index the contents of my Groove Workspaces?”

a.     Great Question; until you think about it a bit more deeply. Problem one is that Groove, by design, encrypts all its data on your HDU. You can’t turn it off and you can’t alter this behaviour.  This means that the search engine cannot access the data because it has no authority to do so!  As far as Groove is concerned any attempt to access the data is denied, as far as Groove is concerned the Search Engine could be a hacker! If you don’t have a crypto key – “you aint getting in!”.  OK, so we could give the search engine a key – we are researching how to do in a secure and consistent manner- but now you have a Search Engine, driven to index stuff,  continually trying to access encrypted data on your HDU!  In a busy workspace that would, potentially, be a nightmare scenario.  Consider this a new delta comes in – gets encrypted – Search engine notices it – decrypts it – indexes it – re-encrypts it.  It changes again – Etc, Etc, Etc.. Computer grinds to a halt!  This is not what you want.  BUT we are thinking about this.  In the meantime; if I were you, I would use the SharePoint Files Tool to save any documents that need to be searchable to MOSS!  Treat Groove as a secure “Work Bench” where you have work-in-progress before it gets made available to everyone else.  And by the way, if you have so many docs in Groove that you need to use desktop search to find things than maybe you should be using another tool!  Of course you could always use Groove Folder share to have the best of both worlds,  This feature allows you to share any folder on your HDU (Not Network Drives and not on 64 Bit computers) while still being able to use the desktop search engine. 

Anyway this was a short list of Sci-fi Groove features which was designed to illustrate the nature of Groove and the depth of thinking that we do to avoid the “Margaret Mead” development methodology trap!!

Someday..............

 

 

Grounded!  Thankfully this week I have no travel; so I have a chance to catch up with colleagues and those things which needed some research and thought before I could formulate a decent response.  

I’m getting lots of questions from other MSFT employees in my region about the Groove Enterprise Data Bridge (EDB).

Conceptually, I love the EDB! It can be a very eloquent tool when you need to have programmatic interaction with “the back-end” and Groove.  The EDB acts as an “always on” member of the workspace that’s sit on the LAN listening for events in the Groove workspace and/or on the back-end system and when it traps the event; EDB does something programmatically – bi-directional or unidirectional data-pumping, update fields on either system or even automatically create workspaces from templates.  

Groove Data Bridge Functionality  

The Groove Data Bridge facilitates integration between Groove clients and third-party applications used by an organization. This is accomplished through the use of administrator-defined Data Bridge identities that integrate third-party software, located anywhere on the network, with information contained in Groove workspaces. These specialized identities merge seamlessly into service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

Groove Data Bridge-based operations gain access to Groove workspaces via the specialized identities which can be invited to workspaces. Workspaces that contain a Groove Data Bridge identity are then present on the Groove Data Bridge device. Once resident on a Groove Data Bridge server, a Groove workspace inherits a rich set of platform Web services that process XML-based calls from external applications in the data centre. In this way, the Groove Data Bridge functions as a data access tier, moderating data and process integration between Groove workspaces and other applications and processes.  

The EDB spurs my imagination – I hope it spurs yours!

I love Vienna!  It's sophisticated, the people are very laid-back and friendly and they have a wicked sense of humour - and great deserts!!  And a top tip for frequent flyers - the airline baring the country's name has got economy class food "nailed". 

 

As a minor shareholder in Microsoft (an extremely minor shareholder - I might add!) I try to keep travel expenses to a minimum and I think that this is general behaviour for my colleagues, so one gets to do a lot of economy class flights around the region.  I have noticed that, by and large, most airlines have gone one of two ways: Sling you a cardboard box with a sandwich and a chocolate bar, or allow you to buy a range of items from a menu.  The folks who took me to Vienna have done the right thing in my book!  No choice, just a very delicious hot snack with a warm bread roll and a drink of your choice:  Hot Spinach Cannelloni with a tomato sauce on the way to Vienna was awesome and slices of pan-fried Sea-Bass on oven backed potato pieces on the return made me happy.  British and German airlines take note!!  Prices being equal this would sway my choice of carrier.

 

OK!  I was supposed to be musing on “Compliance”; and in a way I was.  We have strict policies and guidelines around travel expenses and some very cool Intranet tools that link into our travel agents systems to allow us to make our own reservations.  So in a way I think my pre-amble was about me complying with company policy and as a publicly listed company MSFT feels the same “pain” that all equivalent organisations do – Compliance!!

 

A few weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I offered to help put together a whitepaper on “Compliance and Groove” for publication on TechNet.  So I have been doing research and doing a lot of thinking about what a customer would mean when they ask us about that topic.

 

Being a, sceptical, cynic by nature I am inclined to be suspicious of such questions – as it often the easy route to avoid purchasing discussions or decisions by falling back to the “old faithful” position of “Security Issues” or “Compliance issues”.   But having put myself in the customers’ position I have been able to “stow” my cynicism in the “hold” and start to come up with some guidelines about to help our customers think about this topic.  What follows is very much, work in progress, and more than a little “Stream of consciousness!” – but that’s a good thing to share with you!  This stuff is complex.

 

So!  I’m an IT manager, IT Compliance officer; what am I worried about in terms of “Compliance”?

 

My first thought is; “well, with what, am I trying to comply?”  This topic is very industry specific: In which industry vertical do I work? What country or regional laws apply? What is my exposure? What is the scope of my role in general organisational compliance procedures? Why doesn’t Microsoft just tell me what I have to do in order to make sure Groove doesn’t break my process? And why don’t they give me prescriptive guidance on how Groove can make my compliance methodology more robust?

 

OK! I’m in the “zone” I feel the pain that you people must feel (in reality I can only imagine – but I have been in your shoes, in a previous life).  First of all my advice would be to go and look in the mirror and ask yourself (answer honestly!!) “What is my motivation?”  “Am I motivated to avoid conflict?” or “Am I motivated towards achievement?”  This is important!  Because you can do the minimum or you can go for the “burn” and make things excellent.

 

Whether you are a “steady state” (motivated to avoid conflict) or “trail blazer” (motivated towards achievement) there are a number of things that you can do to maintain your status quo and be a happy Groove owner.   By the way; before you continue ask yourself this question: “ What is my user community doing now when they want to share a file/data with people outside my organisation?”  My guess is that they send email attachments!

 

 Get a head start here if you want to block that leak!:

 

Office Groove 2007 has been designed to enable effective collaboration across organizational boundaries without compromising data security or requiring extensive intervention by IT staff. To enable more secure collaboration; Office Groove 2007:

 

 

1.     Uses standard Web protocols to cross firewalls. Until now, allowing users to securely collaborate with others outside of their organization meant enlisting IT resources to set up a virtual private network (VPN) or alternative solution, such as a secured, shared Web site. With Office Groove, users are empowered to collaborate through firewalls securely, with no extra effort required by IT. Office Groove firewall transparency uses standard Web protocols to avoid requiring network administrators to open special ports in the firewall. 

 

2.     Encrypts all content on disk and over the network. Office Groove automatically encrypts all user accounts, workspaces, and their contents locally using 192-bit encryption. Furthermore, all content and activity within a workspace that is sent across the network is also encrypted and can only be decrypted by other members of the workspace.

 

 

3.     Provides user–driven workspace access control. Role–based access control is a security feature that most organizations want, but, in practice, find unwieldy to implement. Traditionally, IT resources are required to move users into separate access control lists. After initial setup, these access control lists remain static and inflexible. Office Groove pushes the power to determine user permissions to the manager of each workspace. With Office Groove, setting the role of a workspace member and configuring access rights take just seconds.

 

4.     Ensures the highest security by default. The key to effective security for an organization is widespread adoption and usage. Office Groove ensures compliance by making its many security mechanisms transparent to end-users. All aspects of Office Groove security are “always on,” and do not allow users to “opt out” of their use.

 

 

5.     Underlying these capabilities is the use of public key technology for strong member authentication, data privacy, and data integrity using standard cryptographic algorithms.

 

6.     The Office Groove environment also ensures the availability and integrity of enterprise data. The Office Groove decentralized architecture and synchronization protocols distribute data among member devices so that, in the event of catastrophic device failure such as a disk failure, data can be restored from other devices maintained within the workspace. The security framework required to meet the criteria for information assurance and the rationale behind the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) evaluation effort assures the privacy, integrity, and authenticity of restored data.

 

 

7.     Perhaps the best feature of Office Groove security, from the users’ viewpoint, is that users hardly notice it. The only security features that standard Office Groove users need to manage are a password. PKI-enabled UI indicators and digital fingerprints can be used to verify digital identities. All other Office Groove security features are transparent to the user.

 

8.     If you want “belt and braces” deploy Microsoft DRM and Groove will enforce it on documents sent outside your Domain,

 

 

Thanks to my colleague Molly Yen for putting together the details in this entry.

 To be continued.........................................

 

 

Copenhagen airport, or CPH, as those in "the know" call it, is in the middle of a big make-over; and they are doing a terrific job!  The architects have created a spacious and interesting set of lounges, dining and shopping areas without the feeling of being in a “Hangar” that some airports tend towards.  Be sure and check out the steak house near gate A! I spent a couple of pleasant hours there today, waiting on a flight to Vienna, and spun a few cycles  thinking about some of the issues raised during my meetings earlier in the day.

The most prominent topic today (I met 9 Danish Microsoft Business Partners and several customers) centred around the “Fear of Peer to Peer” (P2P).   P2P has a bad name with IT Professionals as the very mention of the term conjures up images of their user communities abusing corporate resources to do “evil” things like file-sharing music files etc, while maxing out bandwidth and generally behaving in an unsecure manner.   I can understand this, as many of the well-known P2P applications are designed and built for home users, have zero security built in, and consequently are really not suitable for a corporate network.  To be fair to the developers who created these applications; they probably never imagined that anyone would use these programs in an Enterprise environment.  Notwithstanding that,  network administrators are very sceptical about the whole deal – and who can blame them?

Apart from the lack of: Encryption, password protection, centralised administration and considered bandwidth management,  the biggest problem with these products is that they are “discoverable”.  By this I mean that you can download various P2P offerings from the Internet, often for free, do a search on whatever keywords take your fancy and quite quickly get a list of other users who are openly sharing folders over the internet who have the media you desire.  That really is terrifying if that folder happens to be on a PC that is on a corporate network!

This is where Groove differs significantly from these consumer offerings.  Groove was designed from the “ground up” to be an application that could give all the benefits of P2P to individuals and corporations alike; by having security, encryption and bandwidth management built in.  But what a lot of people do not understand is that Groove only behaves as a P2P application when workspace members are on the same subnet.  When any of the membership of the Workspace are not found on the subnet (Groove uses LAN-DDP to discover this state) Groove then looks for the members outside the subnet (using WAN-DDP) which engages the services of the Groove Relay Server, to securely traverse firewalls and distribute the encrypted data to those members who are not available on, the more network-efficient , P2P connection.  Furthermore If you have not been invited to the workspace and done a “3-way handshake” to establish your credentials, these workspaces are, to all intents and purposes “Invisible”.  There is no search engine that can be used to to find them, there are no “shared folders” to join.  So what we have in Groove is a non-discoverable, encrypted, secure place for users to collaborate without any of the anxieties that, “Home-user" P2P applications, would create for IT.

Here is a great TechNet article written by my colleague Yung Chou for a more complete exploration of the topic.

I have had an interesting couple of days, since the last entry.  A theme is emerging! That’s the funny thing about this job is that topics seem to converge.  The latest topic that has floated to the surface is automating the publishing of files into Groove Workspaces.

All of this has been internal where Microsoft folks, having used Groove for a while now, are beginning to wonder if they can automate some of their processes. A point in case:  We have an internal Groove application, called the “Account Management Tool”: Sales managers go to an internal SharePoint site where they can see a list of all the accounts that they manage, stored in Siebel,  from there they click a button and the Groove Enterprise Data Bridge automatically invites them into a Groove Workspace for the account team.  One particular Sales Operations Manager has 160 account workspaces that he is a member of and wanted to be able to inject 3 Excel pivot tables that he had mined out of our Sales Processing system into these workspaces without having to open 160 workspaces and do a manual import.

After a bit of Q&A, we were able to establish that there was quite an easy way to automate this task using a Windows service which we had written to take advantage of the local Groove Web Services API!  Voila another happy customer.

While I was refereeing this development activity I was contacted by a few colleagues who wanted to be able to get Outlook Data into Groove easily and I was happy to be able to point them at one of our Business Partners Hommes et Process who have developed “GrooveIT”  - which for EUR 9.00 is a steal – you must check this out!  Some other Partners have created great add-ons for Groove notably:

TeamDirection – Groove connector for Microsoft Project.

Information Patterns – Reporting, GPS integration and programming tools.

 

I’ll bet that has you wondering – “Why would you even ponder such an idea?” It’s like those Zen Buddhist Koans along the lines of;  “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”  Yet, believe it or not, quite a few people I come across think that somehow we at Microsoft are going to make Groove become a way to have “Off-line” SharePoint.

Maybe the title of today’s ramble is starting to make some sense.  Boeing 747’s come in all kinds of configurations; I know I have been in many of them, but whether it’s as configured as a passenger liner, all cargo or even Air Force 1, there is one thing we can all agree on IT’S BIG!.   Equally we all know what a Lear Jet represents: Speed, flexibility, exclusivity, light and small scale.  If someone were to say; “can I please have a Lear Jet ready so that I can transfer the contents of my 747 to it so that I can land on a runway that can’t take a Jumbo jet”, you would be grinning like a Cheshire cat and making slow rotational movements beside your temple.

We have a customer how wants to do the equivalent: They want to be able to take their SharePoint site off-line into Groove, and wait for it, have all the URL’s work in an off-line mode!!  Techies among you should be rolling around slapping your thighs – if you are not a techie allow me to let you in on the humour.

A  Microsoft SharePoint site is basically a web site.  On a web site every page, document and element has an address, which is called a URL. When you click on a URL, your computer figures out how to navigate to the Internet resource with that URL. So if you click on http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx , your computer first looks for a computer called “office.microsoft.com”.  It does this by contacting a network service called DNS (Domain Name Service) which figures out, from stored look-up tables, the IP address of the website and directs your browser to it.  Once you are attached to the site it looks up the rest of the URL from left to right.  In our example the next element to be discovered is the directory on the server “office.microsoft.com”, called “/en-us”, then the sub-directory called “/groove” and finally the document called “FX100487641033.aspx”.  Usually this all works wonderfully- thanks to the magic of DNS.  But what happens if you try and open a URL when you are disconnected from the Internet? "Cannot Find Server or DNS Error"; that’s what.  This is because your off-line computer cannot contact DNS to resolve the URL to the Host (fancy name for a computer/server).

Now if I copy some SharePoint files, Libraries or documents into my Groove client I can check them out when I am on-line; the open them, edit them even delete them while I am off-line and synchronise these changes back to the SharePoint server when I get back on the ‘net. This is all good stuff. BUT, and here is the point of my story, if I click any URL in any of these documents while off-line my Groove client will attempt to look for DNS and won’t find it and my browser will launch and give me a disconcerting message such as: "Cannot Find Server or DNS Error". 

Some of our really clever business partners have come up with a neat solution to this problem.  Which is back to the 747 analogy (the smarter readers will have figured out that Groove is the Lear Jet!) So; I want to take my SharePoint stuff off-line and still retain the ability to follow links (URLs) without the DNS problem.  How do I do that?  Well every computer can be a Host and every computer can communicate with itself as if it were communicating to an Internet based computer – it’s called “localHost” or “Loopback Addressing”.  What these clever business Partners have done is to create Windows applications that pull the whole SharePoint site down to the PC and then replace all references in the Host name of the URL (“office.microsoft.com”) to “LocalHost”; so our original example would become “http://localhost/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx” or “http://127.0.0.1/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx”  where “127.0.0.1” is the LocalHost IP “loopback Address” – if you must ask more about that check out http://www.w3c.org .  As every Groove client is in effect a “Web Services Server” it becomes much more complicated and asking us to do off-line SharePoint is not what Groove is for.  The 747 already exists! Why would I try to turn my nifty, light and flexible Lear Jet into a Jumbo?

If you do want to carry your whole SharePoint site around on your laptop and you have a big HDU then check out these Microsoft Partners, below, who have great tools for that job. 

Me?  I’ll take the Lear Jet!! J

BTW if there are probably more good Partner solutions out there – I just know of these ones!

Colligo

iOra

Syntergy

 

No travel tales today as I am happily enjoying a travel-free few days at home in Alresford.

Having spent the first half of the day dealing with all the admin that had built up both in my business commitments and at home I was pleased and refreshed to receive a call from a senior global systems architect, from one of our “household name” accounts,  who has been using Groove since version 1!!

This was not a surprise event as we had been playing “phone-tag” for a week (we both have travel - rich roles) but it was daunting to meet someone who had been using Groove when I was still working for IBM/Lotus in the last century!!  

He called me and having established that he was not the Microsoft employee of the same name we engaged in a really fruitful and friendly discussion for over an hour on Groove 3.1x Vs Groove 2007.

His organisation had standardised on Groove a few years ago and now needed to buy a substantial number of new licences.  This was being driven by user demand and this poor guy had to figure out  his options.  Scary stuff;  when you have hundreds of users on V3.x being run on what was Groove Network’s hosted services and now you can no longer buy Groove 3.x licences!

His anxiety was not helped by the anecdotal evidence that he had heard about Microsoft’s licensing model  being , to put it mildly, somewhat challenging!   As a long time Groove Networks customer he was slightly scared about how this was going to affect him and his organisation going forward – who could blame him?

His first concern was to establish that a co-existence scenario was sustainable; could he have Groove 3.1 users and Groove 2007 users on a Groove 3.x hosted infrastructure?  Having spent  10 years+ working for global software vendors, I must say that this was, probably, one of the only times when I could deliver very positive responses that allowed us to have great conversation; not only in terms of  the good co-existence scenario between versions,  but also  about the relative merits and de-merits of staying put,  exercising “downgrade” rights on 2007 licences (which we allow), or thinking about the upside of migrating to the latest release.

This is a relatively common conversation for me to have, given the many, many existing Groove 3.x and 2.x users worldwide; they are all scared that the change of ownership of the company will somehow mean that they are left with something that is obsolete!  That’s not the case and the sigh of relief when they hear the detail is almost audible.

The more bizarre conversation (from my point of view) is talking to Senior IT staff who think that Groove 2007 is V1!  Believe it or not even some V3 customers act as though Groove 2007 was a new product from Microsoft that would need to be allowed to roam the planet for a few months and get a point release before it was fit for business!!

I’m not trying to say that the co-existence scenario is perfect, after all you would not expect to get a colour television signal on a black and white TV, but it is not as scary or as off-putting as lots of people think.

If you are thinking about these issues right now here is a quick primer for you, from the esteemed Mr Abbott Lowell,  Senior Technical  Product Manager for Office Enterprise Edition, with more detail to help you do what is right for your organisation:

Client co-existence:

http://blogs.technet.com/groove/archive/2007/02/23/workspace-compatibility.aspx

The TechNet Groove pages:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/grooveserver/default.mspx

The Groove Advisor Pipe:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/Ol8sJNO62xGxPo1gZoQMOQ/

 

 

 

 

I just spent Thursday and Friday with the Microsoft team in Johannesburg, South Africa and 30 Business Partners giving them a deep dive into Microsoft Office Groove 2007.  I feel less of a fraud now having done the "A" in EMEA! 

I was amazed by two things, having never been to Africa before: The people everywhere seem so happy and friendly; even immigration officials, who in general tend not to be!  Secondly the Partner community have embraced Groove in a way that I have not seen in any other country. many of them are using Groove as a CRM tool to give their customers instant access to their account team and share documents.  Perhaps the unreliable nature of the public network infrastructure makes Groove a great tool to enable cross company collaboration.  

Johannesburg airport was fascinating and a top tip to avoid embarrassment, I wish I had have been told in advance, is that after you check in you need to walk past the check in agent, through a small gap, to get to the departures area proper.  

The airline did a great job of making me comfortable for a 12 hour session in a pressurised tube and when I arrived at Terminal 1 Heathrow at 6:30 I used my business class boarding card stub to blagg my way through fast-track transfer to Terminal 4 where I was to catch an economy class flight to Amsterdam. In T4 I found a very cool "Quite Area" near Gate 8 which has sleeper seats, no noise and a separate smoking zone.

In Amsterdam I was met by a member of the Dutch MOD who whisked me off to the town of Assen, 2 hours away by car, where the local government had set up a simulation scenario to see how they could deal with an outbreak of Pox.  

When I arrived at the TT racing circuit in Assen  I was amazed to see hundreds of Dutch people lined up in an elaborate, airport style, queue system singing at the top of their voices, while the waited to be registered for inoculation.  Later I found out that they where members of a local choir who had been invited to participate in the event.

The purpose of the exercise was to see if the authorities could inoculate all of the citizens in a pre-determined time.  In the past the plan had been to do this with pen and paper, which took up to 15 mins per person: We managed to do it using fingerprint readers and Groove in 30 seconds a person.  When you need to carry out this process with 400,000 people during a genuine emergency, time, is of the essence.   Now we have the metrics upon which to build a response mechanism that could scale out across the country. If with 25 laptops in a single site we can process 600 people in an hour then it's purley a mathematical operation to figure out how many laptops and how many stations are needed for any given population; but the point is; it's feasible!

The coolest part of the whole exercise, for me, was the fact that the folks who conducted the registration where all volunteers from the test group who had no training other than a 5 minute tour of the tools they had to use.  This was all done on a WIFI LAN with laptops using Windows XP SP2 and BIOXS's fingerprint readers and software which was "pumped" into Groove workspaces to aggregate the data securely for consolidation and verification on a back end system using a "sneaker-net".  The idea was to simulate a crisis management/response scenario where the normal network connections where not available.  

The whole exercise was sponsored and overseen by the Dutch Ministry of Defence and several senior security officials for the MOD and related government security agencies, who, without exception, were delighted with the results. In The a Netherlands the MOD are responsible for these kind of public emergencies in terms of logistics and delivery while the Local Government Authority "own" the process and framework.  

I'm off to Copenhagen next and Austria for some interesting conversations with customers about how Groove would expose them if the need to be SOX compliant.  That should be interesting

 

 

I called my Windows Live Space "The Smooth Guide" because I wanted to blog about things I learn while passing through airports and staying in hotels as a frequent business traveller, around Europe, The Middle East and Africa. 

 

Working for Microsoft EMEA requires me to spend much of my time away from home on short assignments. 

 

The typical cycle is leave home on Sunday in the early afternoon, travel to Heathrow Airport, arrive at my destination and check in to the hotel in the late evening, get up early the next morning and go to a customer's office or Microsoft site, head off to the airport; for an early evening flight to the next city.

 

While there is a well established publication called "The Rough Guide", popular with young tourists that gives up the secrets about where to go and where to stay on a shoe-string budget I thought a resource for business travellers who, if you are like me, want to make the trip as smooth as possible, was missing.

 

Many of my colleagues and customers find that "getting their head around" Microsoft Office Groove 2007 is sometimes challenging, especially when they think about how Groove might affect their security and compliance policies: So I thought that this would be a good place to add entries in my Smooth Guide blog to discuss some of those issues and how I think about them.  Here we are then a double topic blog! 

 

A smooth guide to Buisness Travel and to deploying Groove Securely while ensuring you are still compliant - how ever you define that!

 

My aim is to add an entry after each trip so stay tuned!