I’ve been slowly logging my experiences while using Groove pretty intensely over the last month or so with a small group of colleagues. It solved a couple of problems for us — so we bought the Professional Edition.
While I’m impressed overall with the Groove platform and the architecture (especially the security architecture), the 2.1 implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
On my Windows XP system, when I switch to Groove, the hard drive goes nuts with activity and it literally takes 10-15 seconds for the Groove application window to open. Ray Ozzie commented two months ago that this could be due to the XP System Recovery option being enabled and suggests disabling it until they can release a maintenance fix to the problem — something I’m totally unwilling to do as XP’s System Recovery option has saved my bacon on a couple of occasions. So, Groove, where’s that maintenance release to fix performance on Windows XP?
Integration with the Windows XP file system is non-existent. I’d like to be able to open/save files from Groove shared spaces from within XP’s file open/close dialog boxes. I can’t do that today. If I’m downloading a file from the web that I want ultimately to end up in a Groove shared space, it’s a two-step (three-step?) operation to get it there. Wastes a bunch of time.
The current Outlook XP integration is also very weak. All you can do today is tag an email thread in Outlook and have it create a new Groove shared space. How about adding the thread to an existing shared space? Nope, can’t do that.
The user interface is also, frankly, so 1990’s. But, then, I also thought the Lotus Notes user interface was so 1980’s! Obviously Ray Ozzie and his team spend their time on getting the infrastructure right and not on the user interface! Successful products are able to do both.
One of my biggest concerns about Groove is that I can’t seem to find any of what Tim O’Reilly calls “alpha geeks” using the Groove platform. Just my opinion, but platforms don’t get to be real platforms without adoption by those alpha geeks. Too bad Groove has stalled on making available a Mac OS X client — that’s where many of today’s alpha geeks are hanging out — and they’re not using Groove. Doing a successful Mac OS X client for Groove would also force an upgrade to the user interface!
All that said, we’re using Groove daily for our projects — so it’s fulfilling a need. But we’re certainly not yet apostles on the product — a number of important enhancements are required to get us there. My sense of the Groove user community (from reading support forum comments) is that a lot of folks are where we are — wanting to see Groove solve these problems and become a very successful platform but also very frustrated at the relatively slow pace of progress in creating the product that turns us into table pounding evangelists for Groove.