Firstly, if you haven't heard of Groove, you will. Groove (the product and the team) is  fairly recent addition to the Microsoft Office family but fills a very interesting niche. Groove is a tool to support collaboration any time, any place without the need for servers to be set up, ports to be opened up, etc etc.

Groove is for teams, organisations and taskforces that need to be nimble and react rapidly and securely to changing situations, whether that be a corporate takeover, a natural disaster o

You can be online in the office, online in an airport lounge, offline in a hotel, or peer networking in a meeting room and you don't have to worry about the plumbing of content management or networking - Groove just finds a way.

But even Groove is not as interesting as what you can do when you pop the hood and reach for the screwdriver.

• I was recently in a live meeting with Michael S. Scherotter, who has leveraged virtual earth inside a Groove workspace, so that workgroups can see content rendered onto a map. This is a feature of almost all my workspaces now. It is a great way of displaying contacts and site information.
• Information Patterns is a partner who develop Groove solutions and they have extended this idea further with their:

Toucan GPS Tray pushes GPS data from your computer/GPS link onto Groove forms, broadcasting your location to other team members at specified intervals. This data can then be used by number of mapping tools, allowing teams to gather mission critical geo-spatial data about member locations, mobility, and coverage.