Microsoft Office Groove 2007

List Price: $229.95 Discount Price: $75.99

Features:

• Collaboration software program helps teams work together effectively, (even if team members work for different organizations), work remotely, or work offline
• Keeps your team, tools, files, and information in one place to save time, increase productivity, and help improve and strengthen the quality of team output
• Features a results-oriented user interface that lets you manage and increase every team member's individual impact; Helps simplify collaboration, streamline business processes and content management, and improve business insight
• Gives you access to a set of next-generation Web design tools, so you can deliver improved information management and teamwork solutions through a fully-integrated set of office utilities
• Shorten review cycles with integrated alerts and contextual communication tools; publish completed documents to SharePoint document libraries with one click for workflow, storage, and retrieval

Accessories:

PC World

Customer Reviews:

The best collaboration tool I've ever used [Posted on 2007-02-05]
After struggling with shared folders, Intraspect, FTP and file synchronization, I've come to the conclusion that Groove is simply a better idea. It works best when you have a group of users who need to interact frequently around a set of topics. Groove workspaces make it easy to share files, to hold threaded discussions, to manage task lists and calendars, and to chat with colleagues in the same workspace.

The technology is peer-to-peer - that means there's a copy of everything on the machines of every user invited to participate in a workspace. This has many advantages - automatic backups, and the ability to work offline are two of the most important to me.

When I started working with Groove (beta), I was in the UK, with a colleague in Bangalore and one in San Jose (CA). We were all able to stay in sync without sending documents by e-mail. Groove is intelligent in that it automatically synchronizes files using an encrypted link.

Because of the peer-to-peer nature of the system, you do need to be online at the same time as your colleague in order to sync. The Groove server may eliminate this requirement - I haven't used it.

Groove appears to be secure, but I am no expert in that - Microsoft has lots of information on the subject.

Another great use for Groove is when you have multi-vendor projects - for example using an agency to do graphic design. You can use Groove to communicate securely through your firewalls. The communications are limited to the content of your Groove workspaces, so it's not intrinsically a risk.

However, from a corporate perspective, there is a risk. Groove makes it easy to invite "outsiders" to access potentially private corporate information. This means that a malicious user could transfer information to a third party in ways that may be difficult for their employer to detect. Of course there are many ways to do that, but this will probably be a concern to some IT organizations.

In summary, Groove has encouraged open and frequent communication across three continents, and has allowed effective sharing and backup of key documents without cluttering our e-mail. Five stars!

Better than e-mail or shared folders [Posted on 2007-05-07]
I live in Seattle and am working on starting a new Web-based business with a colleague in Singapore. We use Groove to share all our files as well as keep track of bugs in our prototype. While the product has a pretty rough user interface- as far as I can remember, not particularly improved over the previous, free version of Groove- it still beats using a shared folder or (shudder) e-mail as a way of keeping our work in synch. It easily saves me enough time and aggravation to be worth the price.

Very Useful [Posted on 2007-10-30]
Groove is a really useful product. My major in college allows us access to Groove through an agreement with Microsoft. It is used extensively by the students. The nature of our work is very group oriented. My group uses our workspace often, many times instead of meeting in person! It has allowed us flexibility to share ideas and files. We are a lot more productive because we can always share information. Creating workspaces is very simple. In fact, I have created personal workspaces with other members of the class just to share information and helps. The file-sharing workspace is amazing. I would recommend this product to anyone who needs to collaborate with others on a tight schedule.

Restrictive Limitations [Posted on 2008-01-18]
I have evaluated this product as an alternative to using the free Microsoft FolderShare service for syncronizing files & folders between my computers. I have found that there are some very restrictive limitations when configuring a file sharing workspace. More specifically, a file sharing workspace is limited to 2GB or 5,000 files, whichever comes first. Once the limit is reached, the files in the workspace will no longer be synchronized.

In these days of 4GB+ flash drives, having a 2GB file sharing limit is terribly restrictive. I have stopped using MS Groove as a result and am currently looking for a better alternative to FolderShare.

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