Groove at the SharePoint Conference
This week in Bellevue: the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2006. Unfortunately I'm not there myself; Abbott Lowell and Jesse Howard from Groove are presenting a couple sessions about the intersection of Groove workspaces and SharePoint sites.
During the Q&A after Bill Gates' keynote, there's an interesting to-and-fro about Groove; specifically around the packaging of Groove 2007 in the "enterprise" Office SKU:
QUESTION: I have a quick question around Groove. It was a pretty significant acquisition you folks made about a year ago, and part of the reason was getting Ray on the team, but part of the reason was also the core software has applicability at a very large base. But your current packaging that you've done with Groove is very specific to the enterprise edition of Office, which actually is limiting from the pervasiveness that you can get in Groove, which can act as a staging repository for documents that could then get into SharePoint.
What was the reason behind that kind of packaging? Why didn't you make it more pervasive? Was it just because it would be too much of a feature overload for some of the broad-based penetration?
BILL GATES: Well, maybe Kurt wants to add to this, but Groove is still available like it's always been, that you can go out and license Groove, and, in fact, there are some very inexpensive versions that are sort of try on the Web and get people involved in Groove.
We weren't sure whether to package it with Office at all, because for some people this offline peer-to-peer thing is super important, and they want it even for some people who don't have Office, and for some people they're working more purely server-based, and they don't as much work with offline and the peer-to-peer thing. But we did decide for the enterprise version to have this philosophy that we basically give people access to all the different tools, and not have them have to think about that.
But I think a lot of the Groove volume will come from people selecting it as Groove itself. The power of Groove still in terms of this client offline capability is still much richer. And we made very good progress in this version of Groove aligning it with Office, and so it connects up in a better way and can use the same forms infrastructure and those things. That's another one of these things that as an architect I think, okay, there's another step we need to go with that, but given that the time we had and the way we aligned things, I think we feel very good about what we've gotten done.
KURT DELBENE: Yeah, I'd say we see the role of Groove as being a central collaboration client on the desktop only growing over time. I think the vision that we have is much more expansive compared to what we were actually able to accomplish in this release.
In terms of the packaging, it may be a misnomer, enterprise means it's the thing that we want enterprises to adopt it as the complete solution in terms of all of our collaboration capabilities in the desktop, et cetera, but we would expect there to be a significant amount of purchases as Groove as a standalone product, and are very much going to encourage that purchase pattern as well.
