Tuesday, June 10, 2008
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.
