The best OS in the world ?

Windows 7, something truly exciting. From the same man who wrote Groove, Ray Ozzie, and designed on the same philosophy, keep it simple, and don't ask the user to do your job of setting up and finding drivers and a whole lot of other exasperation that drove people to the Mac.

And believe it or not, it runs even on a Pentium III, amazing, total redesign of the OS not the incremental stuff that MS has been inflicting (Vista) on us for years

way to go MS - you may just become a well loved company again some day soon :-)

Document Tracking and Workflow

Microsoft Groove Based Document Tracking and Workflow published on Code Plex for free! Enjoy! - http://doctrackandworkflow.codeplex.com/

Powerful yet Simple Customisable Workflow Using Groove Workspace Forms

This tool was done for a Dubai based client in the Cut & bend Steel business.

Typically for each project say the Burj Dubai, they receive documents / drawings of around 1 Giga Byte. These are dropped into a groove workspace shared by their offshore centre and are transmitted automatically and reliably by the file sharing tool.

Dubai then uses our RWS form to define different tasks and deadlines for delivery. At the offshore centre the teamleader allocates work to multiple detailers. Each of them then adds one or more Submission records indicating when the work will start and end and Dubai can see the workflow without making a single phone call to monitor progress.

There are 2 levels of approval to be followed by the offshore team and the finished drawings are returned to Dubai. There a trigger alerts the GM who obtains client consent and grants the final approval that allows the drawings to be processed for production.

The entire process is automated and requires no special IT admin or support. If any document is revised the system maintains revision numbers and also ensures that the original documents are never overwritten, thus maintaining a perfect record of the process for later billing.

The published Tool has deliberately been left open so you can see the simple JavaScript code. Users can customise the project form to apply to different businesses and developers get a bunch of very useful functions they can learn from and apply to their own designs

we are happy to share this with all so pass the word around please. The Tool is available here http://computact.web.officelive.com .

Feel free to call us for any clarifications.

regards

Ashok

What drives Innovation and can you accelerate it.

people talk of innovation, knowledge discovery and how best to encourage them. Some structured processes do work but history shows that the best results come from unstructured interaction, often in corridors and around coffee machines.

with traditional collab technologies that were too dependent on Administrators / Resources etc. there is a natural inertia to the creation of new groups, topics, linkages that could lead to new ideas and knowledge discovery. very difficult to simulate the spontaneous discussions around the coffee machine.

With Groove a user who has a problem or idea can create a workspace and invite some members into it, who he feels have appropriate knowledge. Those members can then invite other members (if give rights) who they think have useful inputs. The original person may not even know the new members in advance, but someone did and introduced him to them. So discovery happens naturally.

Once together groove provides members with many ways of interacting in real time with discussions and calendars and live meetings and even structured data capture with Groove Forms. decisions are taken rapidly ideas tossed up and out by quick peer review. Members bring past knowledge to the table and an new KB begins to evolve around the task, good for future use.
At any time new members can be invited to provide specialised inputs and then they exit after their part is done.

A groove workspace is a fluid and lifelike environment which creates a warm nosed feeling among members, allowing them to relax boundaries and focus on the task. The best part is that members can take ideas home and work when it suits them - when they connect again all members will be synced.

Equally important is security and privacy - groove ensures that no one outside a workspace (non member) can ever see data from there - there is NO leakage. So people can speak freely with no fear that they will be overheard and compromised.

As a result of these factors someone like GSK who bought 10,000 licenses and used them for their R&D teams, found dramatic improvements. Project that involved 20-30 people across the world and normally took 7 months, were now completed in 4. Decisions that took days were taken on the spot and the quality of results was markedly better - they had their ROI in the first 3 months with costs down 40%..

Once you bring the groove culture into your organisation you will wonder how you ever did without it :-)

i could go on but it would help to understand what you have in your mind. some reading material here
http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcomputact%2Eweb%2Eofficelive%2Ecom%2Fdefault%2Easpx&urlhash=gBiJ&_t=mbox_grop

Virtual Office / E-Work

IBM should use groove Workspaces :-)

IBM discovered that workers who spend three or more days without talking to a manager or colleagues start to feel disconnected. "Employees used to feel that IBM meant 'I'm By Myself,'" says Dan Pelino, general manager for health care and life sciences at IBM. "We learned that it was important for managers to understand that people feel that way and to create new collaborative environments and to ask what they're doing." IBM teams use tools that provide customizable online team spaces, or portals that can be tailored to a specific project—complete with calendars, task lists, discussion forums, and document libraries.

Time to start thinking seriously about Cloud Computing

But with the Internet set to overload in 2010 as rich content increases exponentially, how practical is it to depend on it for mission critical work.

Featured Discussion posted on the Dynamics Elite Group on LinkedIn

Hi all 

my thanks to Jade Banham for the invitation. Since i am not a practicing Dynamics professional at the moment, why am i here. 

i have been associated with products like Navision from the mid 90's before it became part of Dynamics. Plus we have built our own very successful ERP solutions. So we understand the needs of this market very well. 

My current love affair is with Groove / Workspaces, and i am the MVP for Groove and a founding partner of the development community from 2001. 

There is a reason for my enthusiasm for Groove because it resolves the single bissgest problem i faced in 20 years of ERP. How to get real time data across multiple locations integrated seamlessly into the backend, and do this with 100% reliability and 100% security. Top that with no need for special servers, replication engines, special communications, IT administration or any other overhead and at a cost that the smallest factory can afford. 

In the last 2 years we have built a number of solutions from Point of Sale to an ERP for Garment manufacturers, based on Groove and they provide a level of efficiency and reliability not matched by an distributed server based systems. 

More, Groove itself out of the box makes a wonderful customer support tool to create interactive help desks and has loads of other features, that give customers that warm nosed feeling, and ensure satisfaction. 

But we as a company don't want to be in the ERP implementation space at this point in time - requires too many people - so I have been seriously thinking of how we can use groove to add that last mile capability and other value, to the Dynamics range of solutions, from Navision to CRM or whatever. 

Using Groove Forms to capture data from the smallest factory in Tirupur, to goods movement across warehouses across india, is so simple it can be deployed in days, with full data validation at source of entry, something even most SAP extension / Dynamics tools cannot do, 

Groove is a complement to any existing Dynamics implementation and i would be happy to share ideas on how best this can be done. Typical ROI is less than 3 months. 

rgds 

ashok

some thoughts i just shared with a colleague at MS

what can i say, you should be using Groove :-) But then i am a believer, not in a product as much, as a way of working. And i could say the same of the groove team and partners i have known for a long time now.

So much else happening is very similar, from Sharepoint, to Mesh to Vine and Azure - a way of computing where sharing of information is natural. Groove was the precussor, way back in 2001, and the reason why Bill Gates brought Ray Ozzie to take over from him.

It's Ray's philosophy that excites us, as expressed in the product. He was determined to produce something that was disruptive, that changed the way people did things, like the Fax or the Cell Phone. Those of us who have worked with it for 8 years believe he achieved that.

At a cost of < 125 $ you get a product that installs and is up and running in minutes, takes less than a day to get the hang off, has no real settings etc that it expects you to twiddle, works with no IT admin or infrastructure support .... i could go on. Groove changes traditional IT equations.

Truly a remarkable platform and concept, It's rebranding today as Sharepoint workspaces is sad in some ways yet apt in others. We have always wanted a true thin client access to our Groove data (don't always have a laptop around) and SP could now well be that. :-)

Won't burden you here with more info here - I have a couple of presentations if you are interested as well as some groups here where we share some of the really powerful stuff you can do with groove. mail me at apwizard@usa.net

rgds