Groove 2.5
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Team blogging
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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