Groove 2.5

Team blogging
Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group group formation. [Full story at InfoWorld.com.]

The scenario shown in the screenshot uses Tim Knip's Groove interop tool -- a Radio UserLand add-in based on Groove Web Services -- to create a genuinely new experience of team blogging. Until now, team blogging has meant that a group posts to a common weblog. This setup does that too, but it also does something I find much more powerful -- it synchronizes the inputs to the collaborative process, as well as the output. In this case, the input is the combined set of RSS feeds subscribed to by the members of the shared space. Everyone knows that everyone else is seeing the same feeds. Discussion can grow around items in those feeds, and can take various forms: replies to the forum that receives the feeds, IM-style text chat, Roger Wilco-style voice chat.

From an enterprise IT perspective, I realize, the term "team blog" sounds a little vague. So let's nail it down. Those inbound RSS feeds needn't be only internal or external weblogs. They can also deliver customer feedback, system status reports, business intelligence -- you name it. And the output needn't be a weblog that you hope will make the Daypop Top 40. Think of it, instead, as an internal "k-log" that selectively exposes team activity to the larger organization.

Groove Web Services is the enabler here, but I hope we'll soon get over the novelty of that and focus where we should: on finding the right ways to manage context, presence, and attention in all kinds of people- and information-intensive scenarios.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/02/15.html#a607