Groove Ships New Version of Collaboration Platform

The product shipment is a major milestone for the young software company, which was formed in 1997 by Ray Ozzie, a former Lotus executive and creator of the Lotus Notes e-mail program. Groove Networks aims to enhance collaborative communication through a platform that combines messaging, data management and file sharing capabilities by creating a workspace via the Internet.

For much of its existence, however, Groove has been running under the radar. The first product, Groove 1.0, wasn't introduced until fall 2000 and didn't ship until spring of the following year. The company aggressively courted channel partners and signed on more than 200 solution providers, ISVs and software developers during that span, but customers were harder to come by. As the buzz around Napster faded and IT spending slowed, peer-to-peer software lost some luster.

Now, Ozzie and his staff are pushing to bring some shine back to the once-hot technology with Groove 2.0. The newest version of the platform features server technology for enterprise customers. Groove 2.0 Enterprise Management Server is designed to help managers and administrators to more easily deploy workspaces, identify and authenticate users, and authenticate domains. The Enterprise Relay Server features intelligent bandwith technology that allows network administrators to optimize the network and control Groove traffic by transmitting changes to a file or document rather than sending the entire document back and forth and consuming additional bandwith. Groove previously used the server technology internally to power its hosted offline model, but the company says customers wanted to use the relay and management server technology internally.

"Customers, especially enterprises, were looking for added management, deployment and administration capabilities, and the Enterprise Management Server provides that, " Groove product manager Donnna Carvalho says. "By making the Enterprise Relay Server internal to an enterprise, customers can assign users as they see fit and additional control to manage network bandwith usage."

Groove's Enterprise Integration Server also provides a software framework that allows customers and developers to build connecters to other applications and external systems. Groove 2.0 also offers additional tools for group editing of documents as well as data management for meetings, group projects and presentations with Microsoft Office products. The new version builds on the alliance Groove formed with Microsoft, which invested $51 million in Groove last fall. Groove is also working with Microsoft on integration with .Net Web services.

Groove Workspace Standard Edition version 2.0 is $49 per user, and professional edition is $99 per user. The Groove Enterprise Relay Server and Groove Enterprise Integration Server are priced at $9,995 a piece, and the Groove Enterprise Management Server is $19,995.