When Groove was aquired by Microsoft way back I was curious about how the had planned to integrate it into their existing information management infrastructure. After reading one of the latest articles on how to integrate Groove 2007 with SharePoint I'm still not convinced.
The gist of it is that Groove can synchronize documents with SharePoint and in the process share these documents with Groove team members that haven't got access to the SharePoint site. To me this is limiting the capabilities of SharePoint as the only thing you use are document libraries.
All the other information – calendar, notes, to do's, etc. – is only found in the Groove workspace. How do I, if I'm external to the team, take part of this information? It would seem as if I have to install Groove and become part of the team in order to do this which might not always be the best solution.
If I don't have access to Groove, is there any way to publish the information to, let's say, the web? If I use SharePoint to collaborate all I need is a web browser in order to access that content. As there are several ways to create external collaboration sites managing users aren't such a big issue after all.
Finally – Outlook already provide off-line capabilities (if, albeit, rubbish ones at times) if you need to take your work with you on the road. It would be logical to assume that Microsoft will improve this in Office 14 (or they've completely lost it).
To me Groove is purely an ad-hoc collaboration tool that you use if you need to keep track of numerous projects spread over numerous organisations and networks.
Or am I missing something?
martinnr5