Yesterday, I updated my Groove installation to the latest version: 2.1c. On my machine, Groove’s disk thrashing seems to be significantly reduced — making it less painful to switch into Groove and to move between shared spaces. Note that this isn’t a minor update — it’s about a 27 MB download! More on my Living with Groove journal.
Speaking of Groove, it gets a very nice mention in this week’s Barrons cover story (WSJ online subscription required).
Groove is a sensible place to start. The brainchild of Ray Ozzie, who also created Lotus Notes, the software aims to give two to 25 people a secure “space” of their own to share documents, compare calendars and hash out issues in nearly real-time. The messaging is slightly slower than mainstream instant-messaging because it’s encrypted. And while Groove holds natural appeal for techies such as Tim Davis of Bean-Stream — his outfit “counts things on networks in real time” — it’s a snap to use. Most folks will be up and running in minutes.
One piece of advice: Groove isn’t something you download and play with by yourself. You won’t find anything there — unless you have a strong need to collaborate with others. Then, you’ll need to get them to also download the Groove trial version and setup a shared space in which you all collaborate — instead of sending each other emails with attachments, etc. But without that need to collaborate with willing partners, forget about Groove. You just won’t get it. I know. I didn’t get it for a year until we had a need to collaborate and agreed, as a group, to give it a try.