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Groove™ (http:\www.groove.net) is a peer-to-peer collaboration application that makes it easy for people to organize and share information and to work more easily with others. Groove™ offers a basic toolset that includes: · file sharing, · instant messaging, · calendaring, · and cobrowsing, among other functions. The fundamental idea of Groove™ is the Shared Space. It is private and viewable only to those who have agreed to participate in the space. Participants in a space can collaborate via a number of predefined tools and applications, and via an unlimited set of applications that developers can create. Groove™ is almost always a peer-to-peer application That is, messages and files are shared directly, unless users are temporarily off-line, files being transferred are too large, users are behind firewalls and require intermediate storage stops, or the number of recipients of a message or file is large. In these cases, Groove™ utilizes a relay hub to coordinate data flow among devices. Groove™ can also be used to create virtual private networks (VPNs) of peers. This is possible with Groove because the identities of users on Groove™ are authenticated by digital signatures (encrypted keys that detail the identity of users on the network) that reside on the client device and on a central registry server. Each user in a Groove™ Shared Space connects and is permitted to collaborate with others within the Shared Space by exchanging digital signatures. It is possible with such a strongly encrypted peer system to create an extremely elegant and easy-to-use VPN across the public Internet. With Groove™ , PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is obviated by the presence of exchangeable identity markers (digital signatures) on the Groove™ client. Groove™ has distinguished itself from competitors (apart from the deep technology and intuitive user interface) by offering its product as a platform for decentralized collaboration. This means Groove is not simply an application like instant messaging or file transfering. Instead, developers and corporations can introduce brand new applications that ride on top of Groove. As a platform, Groove™ is a base on which developers can build applications, like: · planning · calculating · designing · drawing · cad viewing, with redlining etc. Source: (http:\www.groove.net)