Groove Workspace
As I mentioned earlier, Groove Workspace differs from the other products. Its functionality lies in the client; Groove Workspace's server component simply replicates all shared documents, discussions, and files to each participant's hard disk. Because participants have their own copies of documents, discussions, and other common files, participants with notebooks can easily read, react, and review them anywhere—on a train, in an airport, or in a meeting. Figure 1 shows Groove Workspace's digital workspace.
Groove Workspace provides a feature called Groove Mobile Workspace for Microsoft SharePoint that might make the client attractive to companies that have implemented SharePoint Team Services. Groove Mobile Workspace replicates all shared content on a specific SharePoint Team Services team site to the client's desktop. When a participant amends any of the content in Groove Workspace, the changes are automatically replicated back to the SharePoint server when the client connects to the Internet. This feature can be extremely convenient for traveling executives who work on shared content offline.
Groove Workspace provides a secure IM function, so the server provides presence information to the clients. Groove Workspace also provides an audio-conferencing function. An interesting feature is the ability to take an Outlook email thread and convert it into a threaded discussion—a useful capability when an idea becomes a point of discussion for a large group. Groove Workspace lets participants jointly view Web pages and collaborate on a Microsoft Word document or Microsoft PowerPoint slide presentation in realtime. However, the product doesn't support realtime collaborative editing on other document types. With Groove Workspace, participants can push Outlook Contacts and Calendar entries to a digital workspace but can't move entries in the other direction. Additional Groove Workspace tools include a shared sketchpad and project manager components to track project tasks.
Groove Workspace costs $149 per client and $9995 per relay server. (Each server supports 500 seats.) If you want to install the product behind your firewall, it must be on a machine running Windows 2000 Server. Several optional components are available. To manage the network bandwidth that the replication process consumes, Groove Networks offers Enterprise Management Server ($19,995), which lets administrators limit Groove Workspace's bandwidth allocation. The company also offers Enterprise Integration Server ($9995), which enables participants to view mission-critical data from enterprise applications. The Enterprise Back-up Service add-on ($9995) to the Enterprise Integration Server enables the IT department to centrally back up and restore digital-workspace data stored on participants' PCs.
Groove Networks offers a less-expensive client version ($49) called Groove Workspace Standard Edition 2.5. However, this version lacks some of the features found in the professional edition. For example, you can't publish Groove Workspace's calendar entries to Outlook's Calendar or use the Groove Mobile Workspace.
SharePoint Team Services
SharePoint Team Services comes with Microsoft FrontPage 2002 ($169 new or $89.95 to upgrade) and the Microsoft Office XP Developer suite ($799 new or $549 to upgrade). Microsoft bCentral offers SharePoint Team Services as a hosted service ($39.95 per month for 20 users and a 100MB space allotment, or $399 per year for 20 users and a 100MB space allotment). If you opt to install the product behind your firewall, it must be on a machine running Win2K Server. You can integrate digital workspaces into an enterprise portal created with SharePoint Portal Server 2001.
SharePoint Team Services lets team members use a Web browser to access their digital workspace, which the product refers to as a team site. Figure 2 shows a team site home page. The team leader can use a Web browser to perform basic customization of that site. The team leader simply needs to select the appropriate collaboration tools from the product's Create page and title the team's resources. If the team leader wants to further customize the team site with the company logo and color scheme, he or she can use FrontPage 2002.
Prev. page
1
[2]
3
4
next page 
