Groove Makes Corporate Overture

In recent weeks, Groove founder Ray Ozzie has called for corporations to consider collaborative tools as a way to circumvent spam. And in deference to corporate concerns about the bandwidth requirements of peer-to-peer software, Groove now supports "binary diff" technology, meaning that only changes to an existing document,not the entire file,are transferred between team members, said Andrew Mahon, senior director of product marketing at Beverly-based Groove.

"Binary difference-based synchronization is critical to us because of the volumes of data involved," said John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young, New York. "We often have several hundred megabytes of active content in a Groove space, much of it being worked on by groups of two to 20 people. Once a document is posted to a space, the changes are typically quite small but often frequent."

The new integration server is where connectors, or "bots," that tie Groove with other applications reside.

John Wollman, senior vice president of solutions and marketing at Alliance Consulting, Philadelphia, said the integration server enables "enterprise applications and data structures to be integrated into Groove tools and the Groove environment." The software also now supports Microsoft Office integration, he said.

The updated management server lets administrators centrally enforce security measures, privacy policies, and the frequency of password changes and password length. Administrators can also revoke software licenses and data on command.

The standard 2.0 client is $49 per user, and the Professional client is $99. The Enterprise Integration Server is $9,995, while the updated Enterprise Management Server is $19,995.