Groove and others
I was wondering if anyone has ever used an application called "Groove".
(http://www.groove.net/) for in-house team collaboration projects. It's
a team collaboration application that let's you conduct meetings, share
documents, maintain discussion forums, chats, etc. It also includes some
tools, such as a project management application.
My manager has been urged by his manager to have us look at it ever
since Infoworld gave it a high recommendation.
I downloaded it today and have been looking at it, and I was wondering
if anyone else has and if so, what did you DISLIKE about it...in other
words, what Uh-ohs are there down the road, before I get too deep into
it.
I don't have heavy experience with Groove, but I doubt if you're going to find a better general-purpose structured workflow tool. After all, it's the brainchild of Ray Ozzie, who practically invented the concept. He's sometimes referred to as "the inventor of Lotus Notes", though that's a little simplistic.
Anyway, Groove is sort of like Notes. The two big differences I can see are (1) Groove is a P2P application, so there's no big nasty Domino server to administer; and (2) Groove was created with workflow and collaboration in mind, while Notes is really a general-purpose communication tool that happens to be a good platform for *developing* workflow apps. Both points in Groove's favor, since the main reason people don't like Notes is the high Cost of Ownership.
The one big downside for Groove is that it's purely a Windows product, and that's very unlikely to change. From what I know of the underlying tech, it wouldn't be that hard to write Groove-compatible apps for other platforms, but nobody seems interested in doing it. If you have a lot of people who don't have Windows on their desktop (any OS/2 diehards at Isogon?), then you're out of luck.
Major caveat: tools like Groove only work if everybody's committed to making them work. I've seen companies use workflow and collaboration software as a cure-all for their organizational ills. It only makes things worse. You can't use tech to solve people problems.
If you're going to evaluate Groove, I strongly recommend not doing it alone. The only way to get a feel for a product like this is to *use* it.
As long as we're talking about workflow tools, I have to mention Wikis, which I'm heavily into these days. Simply put, Wikis are web sites that any user can edit. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? But in fact, Wikis have been quite successful for things like collaborate programming and maintaining customer service notes. Of course, Wikis rely heavily on a spirit of cooperation by their users, but as I noted before, that's something you need in any case.
Some useful links:
http://www.ozzie.net/blog/
http://www.suite75.net/blog/mt/Groove/
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/WikiCulture
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