InfoWorld: What is Microsoft doing to better tie together Office 11 % .Net servers?
Raikes: If you look at what we did with SharePoint Team Services in Office XP, we in effect put in place a collaborative foundation. All of us in this industry have learned a lot about "collaboration" in the last 10 years, and clearly a lot of it's done via e-mail and more and more it's being done over intranets. What we did with SharePoint Team Services is we made it possible for people who weren't trained as Web site designers to be in effect a Web site designer, but they don't know they're Web site designers. What they know is they're getting a job done. They're setting up a site for fiscal year planning, for a Sixth Sigma project, for whatever may be appropriate. With SharePoint 1.0, we put that concept in place and it's being broadly adopted. It spread like wildfire. I mean, just in Microsoft alone there are something in excess of 15,000 SharePoint 2.0 Services sites. We had a site for our product quality initiative, a site for our fiscal year planning process, and so on and so forth.
InfoWorld: How do you see Groove fitting into this?
Raikes: We have been on the other side of the fence at times, but we've always respected and admired [Groove Networks founder] Ray [Ozzie]'s vision and technical ability. He has had a great impact on us. He sat in on some of our file storage or unified storage discussions and provided us [with] good feedback for some of the things in the .Net platform. The thing that I think customers are fascinated by with Groove today is the fact that you can do peer-to-peer collaboration, you can do it offline, you can do it through the firewall.
InfoWorld: So you can collaborate across an enterprise domain?
Raikes: Right. SharePoint Team Services has some great capabilities but [it] is very much focused within your corporate intranet and online. So with Groove you can extend SharePoint Team Services sites to go through the firewall and to be offline. So there's some very nice synergy there.
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