Today I finally had an opportunity to try Groove. The purpose we want to use it is in an architecture-type of project involving a small project team. There is about 40 people we will need to talk with and there are many documents we will need to read and review and quite a few which we will be developing.  Looking for a way to how to share up-to-date versions of documents that are going to be changing on daily basis I thought this should be an ideal environment to try to use Groove in. Actually after trying the software I found out that our work setup is one of the Groove's target scenarios.

"Consider a typical professional services firm that provides accounting, consulting or legal services. These businesses often send a handful of auditors (or consultants, or attorneys) to a customer site. There, typically in an office without network access, each auditor sits with a huge stack of papers and a laptop computer. Usually one auditor needs to share information with another auditor. Their primary means of interaction is to turn their laptop around and ask their colleague(s) to take a look at something and to share an opinion or help to clarify an anomaly. "

I am not an auditor, but the story seems dangerously close to reality.

Last time I tried to install Groove (about a year ago) I had some technical problems which put me off using it for a while but this time, the installation of the current version (2.5) took about 5 minutes including creation of userid and setup of a shared space.

During the next two hours of toying with Groove, we found that the document sharing tool does exactly what we wanted from it. We also found that for our purposes the meeting manager tool will be particularly useful - we will have to prepare, keep track and write up many, for which Groove provides structure way. I've also setup other tools I thought may be useful - outliner, discussion and project managemer. But with these we will have to see if we have any use for them.

When compared with email and a shared network drive hell we would normally use, Groove helps you to be consistent and up-to date. When compared with Lotus Notes, which I was using in the past for similar purposes, it is much easier to setup and use, much more integrated and much intuitive.

Although I am curious about its offline/dialup mode, so far, I would say Groove is a fantastic collaboration tool for small, but communication-heavy projects.

9:03:31 PM