Groove vs. SharePoint? (No, think Groove *and* SharePoint!)
[Cross-posted from the Groove Advisor blog because this addresses one of the top FAQs in the SharePoint community. For more information, check out the Groove and SharePoint Integration white paper.
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I get asked a lot about Groove and SharePoint. They both support collaboration, right? Why do I need both? Can't I just do all my work in _______?
While each is a strong product in its own right, they are really targeting different types of activities. Deploy them together, and you can get some great synergy.
SharePoint is a Web-based environment with a scalable, searchable back end that’s ideal for broad information sharing across a department or organization. Groove is a rich client that runs on the user’s PC and facilitates decentralized collaboration; it is designed to support small teams of people working together on a project of some sort.
SharePoint is great for developing business applications with structured workflow within organizations while Groove facilitates communications through direct connectivity (mostly peer-to-peer but not entirely) inside or outside the organization and from anywhere. Groove is ideal for very ad-hoc, dynamic teamwork when its critical for team members to be able to work easily with anyone - in the office, disconnected on an airplane, or remotely from home.
These two seemly different types of activities are actually quite complementary, as often the centralized hub - where information is broadly shared and where business application logic lives - drives the need for dynamic, ad-hoc teamwork. Similarly, the dynamic team work that happens “on the edge” of an organization must be broadly shared through the centralized hub and may in fact drive workflow activities. The information lifecycle can also start with information gathering followed by analyzing, processing, publishing, and end with archiving.
With the 2007 Microsoft Office release, Groove takes a step toward becoming the rich client for dynamic team work while SharePoint continues to evolve as the the centralized, scalable system where that work gets published, broadly shared and searched, and integrated with structured business applications.
Teams work together dynamically in Groove 2007 workspaces and then seamlessly publish (or bi-directionally synchronize) the work to SharePoint.
These capabilities work out-of-the-box for document collaboration and can be designed for structured data and business applications through integrated solution development (more on that soon).
From a user’s perspective, Groove and SharePoint are similar in that they provide technology that facilitates teams working together. However, because the architecture of each product is so different, teams use the products in different way and for different reasons.
- SharePoint is a powerful part of the overall solution for addressing enterprise requirements like: Enterprise Search, Portal deployments, ECM, and Business Forms development and workflow Processes.
- Groove is part of the overall solution for facilitating dynamic teamwork across the firewall and beyond organizational boundaries.
- Groove is not a portal for storing large amount of information but it’s a workbench for the very frequent information exchanges needed for dynamic collaboration.
Abbott Lowell, Senior Product Manager for Groove
