(SOURCE:Scripting News)-Still processing this. Is the hype justified? Guess I need to break down and put Groove on a Windows box and use web services to interact with it from the non Windows world! Eines Tages!

Is Groove the stealth killer app of the early 21st century that companies are using to quietly gain a competitive advantage like the CIA many other organizations quietly used NeXT to build their internal killer apps? I doubt it, but you never know! Malsehen! <quote> Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future — years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semistructured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple, secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group formation. To make an omelet, you have to break eggs, and what Groove broke was compatibility with the e-mail infrastructure that serves (poorly) as our medium for team communication and as our distributed storage system. Groove also broke compatibility with the Web. Documents and messages in Groove's shared spaces had what looked like URLs, but those URLs didn't mean anything outside of Groove; they couldn't be bookmarked, shared, nor posted to the Web. Finally, Groove planted deep roots in Win32/COM, all but foreclosing non-Windows platform options. They were hard choices with serious consequences, but there was no other way to make the omelet. What the Groove Workspace has delivered since Version 1.0, and steadily refined through Version 2.5 released last week, is a seamless and comprehensive environment for collaboration. It defines what Microsoft and Apple will be lucky to achieve by 2006. When they get there, of course, they'll bring along everything Groove had to jettison in order to sprint to the finish line. Meanwhile, Groove's challenge is to reel in what was thrown overboard. The 2.5 release confronts that challenge. </quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Team blogging

Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.]

The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group of folks post to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat. ... [Jon's Radio]