The software, Groove Workspace 2.5, is available Tuesday, a month after its anticipated ship date, the company said.

Solution providers were especially bullish on tighter ties to Microsoft's Sharepoint Team Services and Sharepoint Portal Server. Using Groove in conjunction with those offerings will enable workgroup members to extend Sharepoint beyond corporate boundaries securely, Groove said.

"What it does is let you create an offline workspace [using Sharepoint content. With the right clearance] you can put a company's intranet into a Groove workspace. It's very seamless, native integration," said Ken Winell, CEO of Econium, a Totowa, N.J. collaboration specialist.

That is a huge selling point especially with global companies with far-flung offices,, agreed Joe Fung, CTO of Ness-USA, a Hackensack, N.J.-based solution provider. " We work with big pharmaceutical companies who are very collaborative and work a lot with external vendors and partners and do a lot of research in different offices," Fung said.

"In some ways, Sharepoint Team Services is similar to Groove but [those Microsoft technologies] are positioned for the intranet within an organization," said Donna Carvalho, senior product manager with Groove, Beverly, Mass. "What we've seen with Groove is people can take that and work with people outside the organization with our cross-firewall support."

Additionally, Groove will enable users to take part or all of their Sharepoint workspaces on the road. "This will add offline support to Sharepoint," she noted. That capability is part of the Groove Mobile Workspace for Microsoft Sharepoint, which ships as part of the Groove Professional client software. Users can then sync their offline and online workgroups either manually or automatically at timed intervals.

Outlook integration will let users with both Groove and Outlook integrate their Outlook and Groove calendar entries and contacts. "The value here is that you can copy your Outlook contacts to Groove and they'll show up as e-mail contacts, and you can then send them Groove invitations," Carvalho said.

"Groove has tools like calendaring and messaging; we've put a SOAP interface on them for interoperability," said Matt Pope, product manager for Groove.

WSDL support means solution providers can now "surface a lot of capabilities," said Ness-USA's Fung. Ness-USA is a Microsoft Gold partner but works a lot with companies that also use BEA application servers and other J2EE-compliant technologies.

As previously reported by CRN, Groove 2.5 adds support for the usual Web Services API, namely WSDL and SOAP. (See related story.)

A new downloadable toolkit promises to enable developers to extend applications to RIM BlackBerry, Pocket PC and Palm devices.

Integration with Microsoft's offerings comes as no surprise. Microsoft took a $51 million equity stake in Groove two years ago. But Microsoft has also muddied the waters around its collaboration strategy or strategies with the recent acquisition of PlaceWare, a Web conferencing vendor. As big a category as collaboration has been since Groove founder Ray Ozzie pioneered it with Lotus Notes, many say it hasn't reached its potential.

A new Boston-area startup, Kubi Software, is entering the fray later this month, with its attempt to take collaboration mainstream (see story.)

The professional edition client software costs $149 per user. Standard edition is $49 per user.