Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 for Office 2007 Users

Chapter 10. Microsoft Office Groove 2007

Microsoft Groove is a strange program, and it's difficult to see where it fits into the long-term SharePoint strategy, but it's a good bet that you will see a lot more integration between Groove and SharePoint in the future. Microsoft Groove, like SharePoint is a collaboration environment that allows you to work with colleagues and others outside your business organization. Of course, as this is a SharePoint book, Groove works with documents held within SharePoint, both Microsoft Office Server 2007 and WSS version 3. Groove offers those who may not have SharePoint an alternative approach to collaboration and offers those with SharePoint another approach to collaboration, especially with others outside the corporate network and when they need to take document libraries offline, and perhaps with others outside their company. For those of you who use Microsoft Office Ultimate or Office 2007 Enterprise, you will have Groove 2007 as part of the Office 2007 suite; for those that don't, it can be purchased as a separate product from Microsoft. Once you create a new Groove account, you are ready to go with the software. The alternative is for a company or large enterprise to have total control over the Groove experience by running the full service as part of the corporate network, using Groove Server. This gives you total control and integration into your business systems. In this chapter, you will use Groove out of the box and see how it works both ...