Friday, August 09, 2002

Groove I had Groove running on my notebook and I brought it up a few times to do things. I collaborate with some clients and people with Groove, keeping documents and discussions in sync. I also use it as a better Briefcase. And invariably, the comments were like "Wow, that's cool! I could manage my distributed project that way. I could keep track of bugs across a geographically disperse team that way. And man, you're disconnected and can sync later?" Then all of them would say "Who's Groove?" Its interesting to note that people need this kind of stuff and they have no idea its even out there or who Groove is (none of the developers in the room had ever heard of them). [...] How do we get people to collaborate? [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog] It was Sam's post (partially quoted) that made me start looking into Groove.  From reading other earlier posts about it, I just didn't get it.  Well, this morning I spent a half hour or so on Groove's web site, and I still didn't get it.  If I hadn't heard so much hype on the blogs about it, I would have quit right there. So then I download and install Groove, and start playing with it.  After 15 or 20 minutes of this, I'm starting to get it, so I think.  I call a few people from a client's office and get them to install it, and we start exploring what we can do.  By now, I'm getting excited about what I can do with this, and I'm starting to think I get it.  We figure out a couple of quick wins, and share a "pilot" groove space out to the team. Now after a few hours of reflection, I think I only get the very surface of this.  This is such a great idea, and seems to be a great implementation.  But I think the potential of this product and idea is limitless.  There is so much you could build this way, so many ways you could collaborate with your team...I need some time to get my head around it.  For some reason I'm reminded of a post a while back from Ingo Rammer, where he's talking about idempotent web services.  The possibilities here are, methinks, endless.  Anyone have any cool ideas? [Greg Reinacker's Weblog] Send me your contact information and we'll Groove. 6:58:09 PM

Groove performance tip, courtesy of some folks at Microsoft who pointed this out to us last week:  Unless you think that you need it, turn off System Restore under Windows XP or Windows ME.  The option causes wicked excessive I/O.  Why?  Because, as they say, we chose poorly.  Apparently, some file extensions used by Groove are automatically and continuously "protected" by Windows, and coincidentially, we used .TSP for telespace (shared space) and .ID for accounts.  (I know that Notes also uses .ID for its keyring.)  Will be fixed in a future maintenance release, but for now, if you value performance over system recovery, turn it off. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] 12:08:38 PM

Sam Gentile asks: "How do we get people to collaborate?". Tools like Groove and Radio represent a paradigm shift.  They create interpersonal connections and share information in rich and meaningful ways.  After my first few weeks at Groove I was convinced that it would be all that people would do with their computer.  Many users now say that Groove is always running.. it's becoming part of their primary use of their PC.  But it will take a long time for the masses to discover, because its not enough to just get the software and look at the screen shots.  You have to start experiencing it with other people in a meaningful context and making those connections before you start having those "Bing!" moments go off in your own head. [John Burkhardt] 12:08:21 PM

A few other performance tips, while I'm geeking out.  During the development of Groove 2.1 (coming soon!), one of the things that we were concentrating on was reduction of disk fragmentation through work in our XML object store.  (It's awesome.  Make sure that you defrag your disk after you've installed 2.1, for a clean start.) One of the things that we noticed during the process was that you can reduce fragmentation if, in Internet Explorer, you use Tools / Internet Options... / Advanced /Security, and make sure that "Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed" is unchecked.  A performance vs. privacy issue, to be sure.  Oh, and I also noticed that it also helps performance if you get 1GB of memory for your laptop and turn off virtual memory :-) Finally, I should mention that if you're a database engineer and are truly into I/O performance, you should check out a couple of papers that I found quite some time ago when exploring the works of one of my personal heroes of the database and transaction world, Turing Award recipient Jim Gray - this on Win2K and NT4. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] 12:05:52 PM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.