Web Services Key To Groove 2.5

Groove 2.5, slated to ship by year's end, will add support for SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, cornerstone Web services protocols. Groove already supports XML.

The company, founded by Lotus Notes guru Ray Ozzie, made its name by offering an easy-to-use way for people to chat in near-realtime and share documents and images privately and securely. With version 2.5, the company is bringing Web services into Groove and allowing interoperability, said Dana Gardner, an analyst at The Aberdeen Group.

"With Office 11, SharePoint Portal Server and realtime collaboration coming with Greenwich, this is all coming together in a way that a Groove session can be launched and information brought in and out of it from those applications," Gardner said. Greenwich is the code name for a set of realtime collaboration capabilities that will be rolled into the upcoming release of Windows .Net server.

One integrator said Groove's increasing integration with Microsoft's offering is key. "The compelling thing is if you're a SharePoint user with a centralized knowledge management repository and want that tightly integrated,SharePoint is where you store artifacts you want to persist, and Groove is the mechanism you use to build those artifacts [collaboratively," he said.