I’ve received several questions about the future of the current Groove APIs in Groove 12. The plan is to continue to support the same set of integration and customizations APIs built on Web Services and Groove Forms that exist for 3.1, with a few exceptions.

The Groove Forms tool is intended for lightweight team collaboration solutions, with the primary scenario involving data input in a common environment for the team (sales leads, customer information) which is then exported out of Groove for use in other tools. In Groove 12 you can use the new InfoPath Forms Tool to host InfoPath as the UI for this type of solution as well.

Here’s a summary comparison of the two forms solutions:

  Groove Forms Groove InfoPath Forms
Focus Collaborative uses of
structured data		 Rich XML data collection
Standardized Schema support
Data Records XML Documents
Multiple forms in
a single tool, or
tools in a single
solution? 		Yes Yes
Relationships Discussions, response hierarchies,
lookups, granular changes		 Not in Groove 12
Programmability Scripting, DHTML,
macros, web
services		  Scripting, macros, web services

 

The Groove 12 Forms Tool has been improved in two key ways over the version that ships with Groove 3.1 with the goal of increasing performance for large solutions. The first improvement is to change the way that forms records are stored so that each form in the tool has its own records definition with just the fields used on that form (rather than each form knowing about all of the fields used in the entire tool). This change to the data definition required an update to a new version of the tool that isn’t backwards compatible with version 3.1. The other change was in the forms designer where an updated version of the tree control was used which works better for forms that contain a large number of fields.

Two Forms script APIs have been deprecated in Groove 12: SendEmail and SendInvitationToChat will no longer function in either new or existing solutions.

The introduction of the new version of the forms tool means that new forms solutions created in Groove 12 will not run on Groove 3.1. In Beta 2 you’ll be able to migrate existing forms solutions to the new format by saving the tool in Groove 3.1 as a Tool Archive and then opening it into Groove 12. Groove Workspace Archives that contain forms will preserve the Version 3.1 format when loaded into Groove 12.

Groove Web Services capabilities (including the Groove Data Bridge Server) remain largely the same with some updates to reflect the new capabilities of Groove 12. The first update is to add support for the capabilities of the new Forms tool, and in particular the creation of GrooveForms2, a new service that gives access to V12 forms tools in a workspace. The significant update here is that the RecordDataSet schema may now contain multiple record definitions, each bound to a particular form in the tool. The GrooveFiles service was updated to work with the new SharePoint Files tool.

Two services (GrooveDiscussion and GrooveFilesDIME) are deprecated in Groove 12 but will still continue to work for 3.1 solutions opened in Groove 12. SendInvitationToChat is deprecated and will not function in Web Services in Groove 12.

A more detailed overview of developing Groove 12 solutions as well as access to the Groove 12 SDK can be found here.  The documentation and SDK here are in beta form, so expect updates to both during the Beta 2 timeframe.