Groove Networks this week will be touting integration of its collaboration platform again with a major enterprise application - this time Lotus Notes, the brainchild of Groove founder Ray Ozzie.
The integration lets Lotus users instantly create a real-time collaborative workspace from within the Notes client and include users from inside and outside a company.
Network managers are finding Groove's focus at aligning itself with established corporate applications right on target with their desire to deploy collaboration tools that work within existing applications, which reduces deployment and training time.
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Support for the Notes client is the highlight of Groove Workspace 2.1 and follows similar recent integration efforts with Microsoft Office and Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint Team Services. As part of 2.1, Groove will unveil a toolkit for Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net.
"We integrate Groove's very 'tactical' collaborative spaces with a traditional center-based repository for all the reasons you'd expect - the ability to index, reuse, archive [and] back up," says John Olson, a director for BAE Systems, which develops systems for defense contractors. "Integration with data repositories is almost always part of enterprise-level [projects] with Groove."
With Workspace 2.1, Olson says he can extend past the firewall some of his existing Notes messaging and workgroup applications. He is working on integration with Office so users can collaborate in real time on such tasks as reviewing and editing Word documents.
With Version 2.1, users can create a Groove shared space from within a Notes e-mail message, which is identical to the integration Groove did with Outlook.
But the Notes integration goes a step further in letting users select multiple e-mails and their attachments and move them all into a shared space and include discussion and file management tools. When the space is created, every user listed on the e-mail thread is sent an invitation to join the shared space.
Groove also has added support for Notes document links, which allows the insertion of hyperlinks to Notes content into any Groove tool that supports rich text such as discussions, notepad, project management or instant messaging.
"We know that no one starts from ground zero, so this integration is our recognition that people are using other products," says Donna Carvalho, senior product manager for Groove.
"We don't want to replace e-mail; we want to extend it. Groove is a platform. We've always said that," he adds.
The company also is adding enhancements to its document review tool and is unveiling a preview release of the Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio.Net, which lets developers create and test Groove applications from within the Microsoft development tool.
In addition, Symbiant Group introduced a video-sharing application for Groove called MediaTeam 1.1 that lets multiple users view the same audio and video content while sharing a single set of controls for playback.
Groove 2.1 is available this week and is priced at $100 for the professional version and $50 for the standard version.
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