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	Groove

Key Strengths

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Groove Workspace is the most effective tool I have tested to develop content, knowledge objects, best practices and lessons learned through collaboration among virtual teams. Since it facilitates so much the ability for people to share, build upon each other and communicate, with little technical hindrance and very cost-effectively, this appears to be an excellent tool to generate the content that should power and fuel organization or institutional knowledgebases.
This is where the culture of a learning organization should find its perfect grass-roots-oriented, technological complement.
Groove operates on its own P2P network and can link teams through integrated messaging, multimedia emails and instant messages.
Even email is sent instantly without support from your default email application.
Groove is a powerful and cost-effective tool both for individual, professionals and small companies as well as for large organization with many teams operating independently.
Groove provides an effective bridge between formal and informal communications, providing the ability to transform email messages into new discussion threads and to share relevant web sites and documents with closed team collaborators.
Groove can be considered to be a special, extensible workgroup platform with its own ecosystem of development and integration partners all creating custom Groove solutions for many different applications. This is quite unique among any of the large and small web conferencing and live presentation tools.
Very competitively priced. This makes a great product accessible virtually to anybody through a well thought out set of very low-cost entry options. List price is USD $ 49 for the Standard Edition and $ 149 for the Professional Edition. Unbelievable.
Three months free evaluation.
Significant integration with personal email and with enterprise system like Microsoft SharePoint and the upcoming Greenwich real time collaboration platform which Microsoft is developing for its Windows .NET Server. Groove can also integrate with Lotus enterprise systems.
Among Groove strong points to consider comes foremost the fact that in general while most users are not permitted to create Notes databases, and can't deploy them across enterprise boundaries with Groove they can "scrounge" messages in any Notes database, create a shared space, and connect users across firewalls.
According to Dave Gurteen (KM guru, see http://www.gurteen.com/), Ray Ozzie (founder of both Lotus and Groove) and Gartner (see ref on gurteen.com) Groove is an excellent tool for KM community support "at the edge of the network". Its strength does not lie in document sharing - it is too bandwidth-hungry - but it scores well for sharing topical information among distributed teams.
Microsoft has provided a significant proportion of Groove's venture capital funding ($51m out of 117).
Groove is designed to work with Microsoft Sharepoint (http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/) - Sharepoint can share information within the corporate network and Groove can link teams inside and outside. Groove Workspace can serve as the mobile, offline, cross-firewall client for Microsoft Sharepoint.
Secure, fully encrypted information sharing across the firewalls, using XML and SOAP standards.
Effective to store document locations and to post commentary on them. It is up to the individual user to use his current preferred technique to access those documents. Let's use it for secure instant messaging, diary sharing, discussions, virtual meetings, shared whiteboarding, VoIP, etc.(excerpted from Groove Online Public Forum) http://www.groove.net/support/forums/ messageview.cfm?catid=11&threadid=5986
Can act as a bridge for many types of interactions that include both Notes and Outlook users -- an important consideration for merged Notes+Exchange organizations, or companies considering their future migration options."