Groove 2.5 Poised To Take Web Services Plunge

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

The company, founded by Lotus Notes guru Ray Ozzie, made its name 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 real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolled into the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows .Net Server.

An integrator familiar Groove 2.5 said its increasing integration with Microsoft offerings 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.

"This integration lets you take that team services site into Groove [itself, sync it up and work with it securely offline and across firewalls, said another source close to Groove

Microsoft invested $51 million in Groove last year, and Groove already offers some Office integration.

In an interview last month, Ozzie, while not specifically addressing the upcoming release of his product, stressed the importance of opening up portals to collaboration.

"The pain point Groove addresses is mobile and cross-enterprise access to things on SharePoint sites. A team might want to involve a partner in an interaction," he said. "They want to go to a solution provider site, click a button and designate pieces of the site to be brought offline. . . . Those pieces are replicated down into Groove more or less like a briefcase. Once in Groove, you can invite people from outside the enterprise to work on those things. . . . and those specific items are replicated back up to internal site," he said.

Groove unveiled its 1.0 product two years ago and shipped it in April 2001. The 2.0 release shipped last April and added enterprise server capabilities. In August, version 2.1 shipped, adding Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes integration.