Integrators Laud Groove Release

Furthermore, integrators said the introduction by Groove of a toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net will likely spark a wave of new Web services applications that can be integrated easily with Groove Workspace 2.1.

Integrators said the new capabilities, and the pace of development by the Groove team, led by Lotus Notes inventor and Groove Networks CEO Ray Ozzie, is impressive.

"This [product doubles the size of the potential target market for us," said John Parkinson, vice president and chief technologist at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. "E-mail integration is absolutely at the top of the list of successful deployment characteristics. The trick to making a collaborative tool work is [to integrate it into what a business already has," he said.

Ultimately, it will likely be the Visual Studio .Net toolkit that has the biggest impact on increasing the sales of Groove Workspace in corporate accounts, Parkinson said. Once developers start integrating new services with Groove, there will be an explosion of new uses for the collaborative software, he said.

"We have several major development efforts on the fast track now that we can develop better and quicker solutions using Microsoft Visual Studio .Net as the Groove development environment and deploy them with the Groove Workspace [2.1 client," said John Olson, director of enterprise systems at integrator BAE Systems, McLean, Va.

The Lotus Notes integration, along with the enhanced messaging capabilities in Groove Workspace 2.1, will "speed sales and user adoption," he said

"For several key customers, Notes integration is key and something they've been waiting for," he said. "Account backup and restore is also important and something BAE Systems has been waiting for."

Each release of Groove has helped increase the acceptance of the product in the federal government sector that BAE focuses on, Olson said. "We are optimistic that Groove [Workspace 2.1 will further accelerate sales into our customer base," he said.

Symbiant Group, a software and IT services company in New York, also unveiled the availability of a media review application for Groove. Symbiant's MediaTeam 1.1 is designed to make it easier to review training, marketing and digital media projects over the Internet.

Rick Lillie, a CPA and faculty member at California State University at San Bernardino (Palm Desert Campus) and a UCLA Extension faculty member, is using Groove Workspace 2.1 and MediaTeam 1.1 to teach CPA classes.

Lillie said these tools are making it possible to effectively teach courses online and communicate with students either individually or as a group with audio, video and graphic content in shared or individual session workspaces.

Groove is a lot more flexible and powerful than many of the high-priced distance-learning management systems being sold to universities, Lillie said.

His initial research found Groove students felt they "got far more of my time and personal attention over the Internet than they would have in a live class," he said.