As a region, the Asia Pacific is a very diverse place. From highly developed cities in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand to some of the remote and isolated communities throughout Indonesia’s thousands of islands, Thailand’s jungles and Australia’s outback.

IT infrastructure in the region is just as diverse. We can find some of the fastest 3.5G mobile networks in Korea and Taiwan and good coverage of broadband in the larger cities. However, bandwidth is expensive and complete coverage is a pipe dream. Often the most important work happens at the least connected places. Even in the most connected places, floods, cyclones, bushfires or even civil unrest can rear up at unexpected times – complicating the situation.

There are certain things that we, as IT professionals in this environment take for granted:

• Outside the organisation means outside of support
• There is never enough bandwidth
• No network is better than austere network
• Secure and Confidential can’t be guaranteed without IT involvement
• We don’t have time to fix these problems

Often the people I speak to have tried to solve these problems a number of ways, but even through VPNs, extranets or terminal services, offline is still a problem. So, most users end up treating their email folders as a repository. Usually 5 team members will have 5 different instances of a document (and 20 different versions). A key sign of when your collaboration systems are failing is when you see things like “_v2” appended to documents.

Enter Groove – the little collaboration engine that could. In the last  six months I have had the pleasure of delivering Groove sessions at Tech.Ed South East Asia in Malaysia and Tech.Ed Australia in Sydney. The reaction from Tech.Ed Groove sessions is always quite amazing, usually along the lines of “How does it do that?”, “Why have I never heard of this?”, “Why is it so cheap?... we spent millions trying to solve this” etc etc. Because it is so easy to get up and running with Groove, pilots usually gather a momentum of their own after that. Pilots turn into production and Groove becomes the way in which organisationally, geographically and chronologically dispersed teams work.

• Where we worried about working beyond the firewall, we now have Groove to provide access to our information offline and on the road
• While bandwidth is always a problem, Groove uses less of it and works on very very bad connections. A common example is Tech.Ed – so many geeks in the one hotel, often websites won’t even load. But groove is still hard at work in the background. It is for this reason that we plan almost all of our events through Groove.
• With Groove, any network becomes a trusted network. IT can breathe easy and the users don’t even have to know.
• Groove workspaces are secure and trusted. IT can manage the infrastructure and the users can work on confidential deals and transactions without having to vet and police their IT folk (particularly important in outsourced or heavily contracted environments)
• Groove is quick to set up, from 30 minutes using Groove Enterprise Services to a couple of days to do a more complex onsite installation. When the infrastructure is ready, users are empowered to create their workspaces when they need it (freeing us IT folk to worry about far more important things than provisioning workspaces).

So, where has Groove taken off in the Asia Pacific? Emergency services agencies, utilities companies, mining and resources companies, schools, small businesses, mobile sales teams... etc. The great thing about Groove is that it solves problems that we never thought we’d be able to solve. That sort of magic is applicable in almost any organisation.