Did you even know that Office 2007 included Groove? The odds are those who did and came around to even using the app are not too numerous. With Office 2010, Microsoft has at last turned to the Office dark horse, a newcomer acquired with Groove Networks and, most importantly, Ray Ozzie, the creator of Groove and Lotus Notes, and now aspires to leverage the peer-to-peer collaboration tool in SharePoint. Under the now well-known justification slogan that reads “Groove is to SharePoint what Outlook is to Exchange”, Groove has dropped its classy name in favor of a more telltale one and will ensure across-the-board access to SharePoint content. This aims at qualifying the relation between Groove and SharePoint as that between complementary entities rather than overlapping ones.

Groove was originally conceived as a client tool for ad-hoc collaboration both online and offline, as well as within and without a corporate firewall. By creating a workspace and inviting the interested parties to collaborate, a user ensures a dynamic workflow focused on a particular task rather than a centralized server-side system.

The move does make sense as an emergency measure aimed at pulling the 2005 acquisition out of sheer obscurity and differentiating it from a whole line of file synchronization apps since, at least to an unsuspecting user, the distinctions between FolderShare, LiveMesh (a whole platform with its file sync functionality just the tip of it) and Groove are anything but clearly marked. If I get Groove’s evolution correctly, Groove basically picked up where Notes left off and, during the Microsoft years, served as the foundation of where LiveMesh sprung up. Groove as such somehow got stuck in the middle, with neither a solid position among other products nor a clear purpose to offer a good reason for its Office existence. Therefore I guess it’s but logical to try and round off the square peg’s corners and make it fit somewhere. By the looks of it, Groove could be resuscitated by stepping on the SharePoint platform in the capacity of performing sync and share specifically to SharePoint content. The direction Groove was following became visible with the Office 2007 version which supported SharePoint file synchronization with a tool called Groove SharePoint Files (while libraries remained left out). Furthermore, Groove lost access to the .NET framework, with just a forms environment left for development of the less global kind if you will.

Anyway, the 2010 product line will hopefully be able to back Steve Ballmer’s point that Groove was among the company’s top five acquisitions. That’s in case he wasn’t referring to Ray Ozzie’s stepping in, of course.

Written by Earnest from Sharepoint Web Part.