busy week - we go live in Dubai on the 1st of june with our new Document Tracking and Production Control System, built for a major (Steel) Rebar Cut & Bend Company.

Based on Groove Virtual Office, it creates a seamless environment, where large CAD designs (Files) move from Dubai to their offshore centre in Chennai, go through the Workflow process, return automatically to Dubai when done.

They are then picked up by the Production Control System (Vulcan) and converted to Bar Bending Schedules, and tracked from Planning to Production and through to Delivery.

The entire process is automated and 100% secure and allows people to concenterate on their jobs rather than waiting for emails, chasing detailers at Chennai and generally doing more paperwork and administration than engineering.

One other thing i am finding exciting - the development of the ME - incredible amount of contruction, growth in all service industries, R&D in green energy, you name it and it is happening there - seriously looking at expansion into that region

Have been doing a lot of corresspondence lately - hence less time to write here -
most has been related to trying to explain the benefits of groove, simply, to first time users. Thought i would paste some of that stuff here for others who might be asking the same questions

What is Groove.
Written by Ray Ozzie, the author of Lotus Notes, now Chief Architect at Microsoft, you could call it version 2 of Lotus Notes and it's opposite in many ways. It is a more powerful, collaboration tool, but also easy to install, needs no servers or IT administration, and is cost effective for even the smallest user in a small town with nothing more than a phone / internet line.

1. Groove creates dynamic workspaces to hold all digital information related to any Task, this could be a software project, a board discussion, or even a virtual classroom.
2. each workspace is populated with only those members who have a need to know that information. Nobody else has access to it and even the roles and permissions allowed to each member can be set by the workspace manager.
3. All members in a workspace have all information automatically synchronised. No cc's and no acts of ommission or commission permit information to leak out or be forgotten. Groove is both identity and device secured, so leaking of a password means little, and data cannot just be copied and restored on another Groove account.
4. Groove guarantees not just security but also reliability of the information passing through the workspace. Once posted, you can be assured that ALL members WILL get that data - even under battlefield conditions, certified by the US DoD, Interpol and other security conscious organisations from GSK to KPMG to the UN.
5. Finally it is a viral product, that just grows in usage and benefits organically. It the best catalyst to innovation within any company, because it brings people together into a real time virtual world, just like being in the same room with the others. It cuts out fritter, speeds up decision making and improves team efficiency by at least 40%.
Web 2 is a long way and will raise more security concerns that i can go into here. Groove has been there and tested for 7 years now, and expects to sell 10 million copies this year alone. It is both a testament to it's value as well as an opportunity to be exploited.

Why is it worth looking at Groove.
1. It is the catalyst to innovation at all levels. It creates virtual corridors and virtual coffee machnes (workspaces) where distrubuted people in the eorganisation meet in real time, or even when offline (more on this later).
a. perfect way to set up newsgroups, bug forums, development forums and to discover talent in the company, you never knew existed.
b. promotes fast and safe sharing of information between individuals in the organisation, and even if needed, outside, without compromising access / security / firewalls within your own organisation.
c. It is viral, as users grow their own ad-hoc workspaces and can choose who to extend their collaboration within inside the organisation, under the watchful eye of an administrator if needed..

2. It is the most efficient way to Manage diverse digital information in one unified interface, from Chat, to VoIP to Shared Calendars, Whiteboards, Threaded Discussions, Images and Document storage, you name it. Create repositories of training material, or knowledge bases for product development, and capture all the interaction that went into getting something done.
a. By keeping all related data in a seperate sowrkspace, Groove ensures that retrieval is the easiest thing in the world, even months after a project was closed.
b. Groove Links provide a wikipedia like experience to navigate instantly from one related document to another, even across workspaces.
c. Groove works in real time, and all interaction from Chats to decisions made are recorded as they happen. This provide web 2.0 type interaction maps if desired to see, not just who got a job done, but when and how.

3. The Security of information in Groove is absolute. If you receive a 1 MB file called Ashok.Doc, from me in a Groove workspace, nowhere on the disk will a hacker be able to find Ashok.Doc or even a 1 MB file.
a. Groove employs multiple layers of security to ensure that information can never be dechipered by any person other than the one it was destined for.
b. Files themselves are fragmented into deltas of change, and Groove tags each delta with each users PPK pair, then adds further layers of encryption, making it impossible to decipher data even if intercepted.
c. All Groove data is serialised and the transport engine ensures that all end points have the same data, handling concurrent changes as well as roll back, automatically, to the point where Groove transport still works, when all other replication or web based databases would fail.

4. Efficiency - Groove works off the LAN wherever possible so e-mails between company members becomes a thing of the past and so does bandwidth wastage. The speed of sharing, opening even large documents is what you would expect from your desktop, since all data is cached securely to your local storage. This is why you can also work with Groove data while offline.
a. Groove creates local images of all data in a workspace, so it goes with you where ever you are and files open instantly, no download. This also provides an automatic backup capability as a workspaces exists for multiple users and if one machine goes down the others simply restore all data.
b. Groove uses the LAN / VPN wherever possible, minimising usage of internet bandwidth, except for those on the road.
c. Groove provides awareness of each member's staus whether on-line or off- line, or idle for a period plus what each active member is currently working on, So work gets done quickly and efficiently, because trhere is total transparency across your workgroup on who is where, doing what.
d. Much of your data data is in flux and large documents may have minor changes made frequently, Groove does not send the whole document between members each time just the changed fragments, both fast and economical on IT resources

5. The Versatility of the architecture allows Groove type collaboration to be applied to any concievable area, in-house, or for customer support CRM / Heldesks, supply chain management, even capturing live data for of all your own business processes,
a. Project planning and control and automatic integration of distributed data with your centralised back end.
b. Distance education for online mentoring in a private and secure environment. reusable licenses allow you to deploy licenses to groups then pull them back when the task or course is over.
c. Security and Emergency response situations, where the ability to throw up a Groove network is something that requires no technical skills, no web sites, no servers to be installed or accessed. Groove works P2P under the worst of conditions - certified by the US DoD.
d. Virtual medicine and social networking of the sick and elderly and complete towns, is just one of the many uses possible in the area of human e-work that is can now be easily accomplished with Groove..

this list would be endless. In a de-centralised world nothing really happens in one building and room, Companies and People are scattered in different time zones, not always connected, yet need to work together efficiently. From a human comfort point of view, Groove spares you the time loss and aggravation that comes with slow e-mails, broken connections and lines, or simply no connectivity when you really need that data badly.
Groove lets you work as if you were all always, naturally, connected.

now we have MESH
cute - but is it an extension of the older SSE i saw at Strong Angel III last year ?
or somethign more
at the moment all i see if a file share space (maybe more to come)

SSE was something different, more like a databse in the cloud
where different aid agencies could post data they had gathered
or access data gathered by other agencies
with a neat groove like sync engine that managed field level conflicts
very necessary in a crisis where data not shared meant help not provided
and resources misplaced or worse just wasted
because demands in one place were never matched to what was available elsewhere

i guess i will remain a groove believer at least for a while as i said to Steve Ballmer at the Summit - see below for my inputs at the Q&A and later in a mail to SteveB
-----------------------------------

Good morning Mr Ballmer,

this is ashok hingorani, the MVP from India, who spoke about groove at the MVP Summit and suggested that MS explore the full possibilities of Groove rather than see it just as a client for Sharepoint. Wanted to leave maximum time for others so even skipped mentioning my name at the Summit Q&A :-)

I have worked with Groove and Ray from the day it was released and probably written more tools for Groove than most out there, including GXcel, which allows multiple users to co-edit an Excel Workbook, something not possible with any other product -using Groove as the platform to carry out cell level sync, online or offline.

To me Groove is much more than the greatest collaboration tool straight out of the box, it is also a platform for building future vertical applications that beat the pants off anything SAP, PWC and others have out there, like Point of Sales, ERP and even Financial Accounting. Even MS's own business solutions would be take on a new dimension, if powered by Groove.

Here is just one real life example :- our client (MD who never used a PC except for e-mail) now sits down to his Groove account at 11.30 each morning, to monitor the opening of his shops across India, something that Groove awareness provides automatically. At 11.45 a customer walks in and buys 20,000 worth of merchandise. The sale entry appears almost instantly at HO in Bombay, synced by Groove, which sits under the PoS application. He sees the large sale immediately, something he might not have known for weeks otherwise, and has the customer on the phone before he walks out of the store.

No expensive IT infrastructure is involved, no time consuming manual integration of data. It just happens, with a reliability that the US Army deems worthy of use on the battlefield. There are many other scenarios that i will not mention here so as to keep this note short, but can send to your people if required.

Groove is also the fastest way to get a customer up and running and hooked, with file sharing, Calendars, discussions and even simple workflow that can be easily built using Forms, as i have done. Once they have tasted the joy of collaboration they are open to the next level we offer, like Sharepoint.

I am not knocking Sharepoint, but imagine sharing 10-40 MB CAD files using even fast internet, the time it takes to download, edit, and upload, and the huge bandwidth it takes if this happens 10 times a day for multiple users in an offshore development center. So there are just some things for which Internet based solutions are not optimum, but where Groove is. As a repository for finished designs, or corporate workflow, Sharepoint certainly is wonderful, but for so much else there is nothing to beat Groove.

So to see Groove as just an offline client for Sharepoint would be a tragedy. To present it as the best Sharepoint client is to state the obvious, as there is nothing else that even remotely compares, providing the best mix of online / offline work.

I do understand there are branding issues involved, but it would be better to work around those, than simply kill Grooves unique identity and utility in so many situations that i could describe, after 7 years of getting to know every aspect of this wonderful product.

with thanks and best regards

Ashok Hingorani
Groove MVP from India.

whats new ?
received the MS Most Valued Professional Award this month for Groove
good feeling
but if i was not over the top already with my net activity i sure am now
all we need now is for someone to invent 30 hr days :-)

So google took over my blog as well - what next ? :-)
was among the first to start blogging then stopped. but now it seems the way to go

couple of thoughts to start of -

Steve Balmer asked at the recent MVP summit
how many used Live Search as their default - not enough hands to count
how many used yahoo as their default - too few to matter
google - just about all the 1400 participants
so the big question why does MS not buy Google instead of Yahoo
but i guess the answer is the communities that yahoo supports - not their search engine
MS is doing their own thing there and technically no reason they they cannot be as good as google - just a matter of time till they accumulate enough content
so lets wait a few years to see who wins the search race - for now google remains my default