Many people ask how Groove fits into the new Office System 2007 platform. At first I though it would represent a lot of overlap with other functionality in the Microsoft platform such as Windows SharePoint Services; and although this may be true for some features it generally provides a lot of additional functionality in areas such as Ad-hoc collaboration, sharing information “peer-to-peer” and it allows you to take information off-line quite easily.

In this post I show an example of how we use Groove 2007 in our team to share a number of presentations that are maintained by various content owners within our team. As the information on the various topics is regularly updated, we ensure that by using Groove everyone in the team has the latest version of each presentation always at hand in a local directory ..

I created a directory containing a subdirectory per topic :

Using Groove 2007 I turned this directory in a filesharing workspace :

In Windows Explorer you can see Groove adds some features to allow replication settings and things like notifications :

After inviting my teammembers the directory is shared across our machines. Whenever someone changes / updates / adds a presentation; the changes are replicated and depending on your notifications settings yuou receive a notification :

Despite the fact that we have other, more structured, ways of sharing information; Groove 2007 allows us do do this very pragmatic and “to the point”.

I will blog about some very cool PowerPoint Slidelibrary functionality in Sharepoint in the coming days …