Get into the Groove

Hands up anyone who has heard of Groove? The Microsoft Office specialists in the front-row can put their hands down. Is there no-one else?

Groove is a bit of a secret, even though it is now a part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite. Despite this obscurity, Groove has significant potential for enabling collaboration and file-sharing among disconnected users or over slow networks. This article aims to lift the mask on Groove, explaining what Groove is and how it fits into the Office suite, and when it makes sense to use it.

What is Groove?

Groove is a file sharing and collaboration tool. With it, users can create virtual workspaces and add files, notes, calendars, discussions, and other items. Groove ensures that all users see the latest versions of the items contained in a workspace. For this reason, Groove holds significant potential for remote and mobile users.

Groove is the newest member in the Microsoft Office stable, and is included in the 2007 release of the suite. Although not particularly well known, with many expecting the next big shift to be into making people more mobile, Groove may be an enabler. Perhaps this explains Microsoft's decision to purchase Groove Networks, a company founded in 1997.

Although new to the Office suite, Groove is not a new product. Like other Microsoft products (SQL Server, Virtual PC), Groove started life elsewhere. It was on its third release before being acquired by Microsoft and so is quite mature.

There are two parts to Groove. The first is the Groove client, a Windows desktop application that lets a user create and join workspaces, share files, and collaborate with other Groove users. The second part is the Groove server components: relay, manager, databridge, and audit. This article concentrates on the Groove client, as this is where most users will interact with the product.

What is it useful for?

The offline capability is perhaps the core feature of Groove and what makes it so relevant to a mobile workforce. Documents added to a workspace are shared between all users granted access to that workspace. Groove manages the synchronisation of changes to documents, pushing changes (as binary patches) to all clients. This keeps the amount of traffic between clients to a minimum.

A workspace is a central concept in Groove. It is the way that projects, documents, and people are organised. Once a workspace has been created, users can be invited to join and, if accepted, can add, edit, and delete files, discussion, calendars, or whatever tools have been configured for the workspace.

A tool is a set of features hosted in a workspace. Groove ships with some useful tools including a threaded discussion list, calendar, document repository, forms (including InfoPath), SharePoint files synchroniser, and a sketchpad for interactive drawing. It is also possible to create custom tools.

Tools are the enablers for Groove's collaboration capability. Once a workspace is created, it is configured with the tools likely to be used during the lifecycle of the workspace. Workspaces ordinarily relate to projects or tasks with a clear definition. If new tools are needed, they can be added at any time. The owner of a workspace is also able to remove tools.

Who should use it?

While writing this article, I helped prepared a major proposal for a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 project. This was jointly authored by three people, each in a different city. Our process for controlling the document was perhaps the same as employed the world over: create the document in Word and send it by e-mail. Turn on reviewing marks, rename it ProposalX_version2 and send it back by e-mail. Review the changes, rename it ProposalX_version3 and distribute it by e-mail.

Sound familiar? As a one-time software developer, this approach makes me cringe. What about contention? Why do we have some many versions of the same document? How secure is e-mail?

Shortcomings of Groove

Groove doesn't solve all these problems. There is no version control or check-in, check-out feature in the product, and in terms of contention: the last update wins. However, it does replace e-mail to automate storing revisions, as well as notifying users that changes have been made.

Another limitation of Groove is the potential it has to create isolated silos of information. In these days of Google and enterprise search, users expect to be able to search across multiple data sources -- e-mail, folders, the Internet. Rumour has it that integrated desktop search will ship with the next version of Groove, but at this stage content stored in Groove workspaces is not accessible to search crawlers.

The last point is not a shortcoming of Groove itself, but a reflection of Groove's newness to the Office suite: There is a great deal of overlap between Groove's tools, and features of other Office software, especially SharePoint. For example, a Groove workspace can contain a calendar, but so can Outlook and SharePoint. There is no synchronisation between Outlook -- probably a user's main scheduler -- and a Groove calendar. A similar criticism could be made of SharePoint.

While the linkages between Groove and other software may be strengthened over time, a key differentiator for Groove's features is that they are all available offline. Outlook messages can be accessed offline, and it can be used to cache a local version of SharePoint document libraries, but Groove is a more flexible tool for enabling collaboration amongst users who are sometimes disconnected, or who work over slow networks.

Groove network

An important feature of Groove is that there are few restrictions on the size of files that can be synchronised, unlike e-mail. For anyone who has ever tried to get a large file to somewhere else, this will come as exciting news. In Groove, the only requirement is that both users have access to the same workspace. Transferring a large file involves uploading the document to the workspace. Groove will push it out to all subscribed clients. Of course, this may take time - Groove is limited by the available bandwidth, but it will eventually get there, despite network interruptions, or even the shut down of the client computer. Groove works in the background, uploading and downloading files.

Something else to make network administrators smile: Groove distributes only the differences (at a byte level) to a file -- not the whole file. This will help reduce the bandwidth consumed by the transfer of large, frequently changing documents. The Groove client is a desktop application running on Windows. Without this client, it is not possible to participate in a Groove network. Groove has its own network protocol, but this is based in the TCP/IP stack and so will run over standard network infrastructure. No fancy dedicated ports for Groove. This means that there are no problems with firewalls or other restrictions to network traffic.

In addition, Groove transmissions are encrypted using 192-bit encryption. By comparison, Web sites secured by SSL use 40-bit encryption. Information stored on the Groove Server Manager (not a relay server) is also encrypted using 192 bits. The Groove relay server is guaranteed not to retain any record of the data it has relayed.

Comparison to SharePoint

In some ways, Groove is the desktop mirror image of SharePoint. They both have workspaces, discussion boards, forms, meetings, file libraries, and forms.

Being a connected, desktop application, Groove has the advantage of being able to show presence information for workspace members and allow real-time chat between them, something not possible in a stateless environment like the Web. Groove is also accessible when a network is not available, although no updates will be made to content.

The main advantage of SharePoint is the usual killer feature of Web applications -- zero-touch deployment. There are no installation files with SharePoint, no dependencies, no client-side licences. A user opens a browser and they are using SharePoint. SharePoint has other advantages that flow from the power of a client-server architecture. For example, the integration between SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) means that complex business processes can now be hosted in and triggered by SharePoint. Groove has, as yet, no such feature.

Groove vs. SharePoint knock-down

Even though they have such similar features, the choice between Groove and SharePoint is surprisingly simple and depends on whether the user group will need to access content while offline? As a Web application, SharePoint requires a constant connection (Outlook document libraries being an exception). This is not usually a problem in a modern office, but could be an issue for a more mobile workforce. Groove has no such requirement. Users can access and update content while offline or on a slow network -- Groove handles the upload in the background.

Another differentiator is around file size. Uploading large files to SharePoint remains a problem, often because of relatively low upload speeds. While Groove doesn't solve this problem, it provides an effective work-around by compressing content and performing transfers in the background -- so the user doesn't have to sit and wait. This can dramatically reduce user's perceived time. Groove also gracefully handles network outages and timeouts. For large files on standard networks, Groove is the easy winner.

Wrapping Up

Groove's offline capability is a killer feature in a workforce becoming more mobile and (ironically) more connected. Additionally, Groove can handle large files - the bug bear of many users over the years.

There are drawbacks to Groove, such as lack of a basic versioning system and no facility to index content, but in its element, Groove literally has no peer - at least in the Microsoft world.

Simon Jackson is a Solutions Manager for Avanade Australia, a Microsoft Technology Partner