Here is an interesting development, Bill visits Ray, which I found on SB Chatterjee’s Weblog
SB writes… "I picked this up from CRN 09.15.03 - 'A little bird tells us that earlier this month, Bill Gates took a tour of Groove Networks' facilities and shared some face time with Groove founder and Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. Microsoft has been a big-time financial backer of Groove, so the meeting isn't a total surprise. But neither of these men gives away their time for free, so let the speculation begin'."
It makes sense for Microsoft and Groove AND for their respective customers to see Groove Powered Applications of every sort continue to roll out.
Currently, applications like MS Word and PowerPoint are integrated into Groove in some clever ways. Groove 2.5 coupled with Word 2002's has a real-time co-editing mode, and Document Review Workflow mode. They make each other remarkably more useful: together they save days and frustration in group writing / editing projects.
Groove 2.5 enables sending invitations to a "meeting" so folks anywhere in the world can give round-robin presentations of their PowerPoint decks and discuss any slide in real time, using voice over IP and/or chat sessions. People who could not "attend" in real-time can catch up later. And all of this happens with DOD-type security over ubiquitous internet connections, without needing Virtual Private Networks, big central servers or IT expenses. In other words, what you probably thought personal computing would deliver many years ago.
And there is more to see in the Groove <-> Microsoft Office pipeline. We can see the promise of real-time Excel collaboration today, in GXcel; Real time discussion of budgets, forecasts, and results over Excel spreadsheets that are alive on each person's screen, with chat etc. The long-ago foreshadowed collaboration capabilities of Xerox PARC’s “Collab” are now available for widespread use.
We will see even more powerful Groove enabling of MS Office applications with the commercial release of Microsoft Office 2003 and a Groove 2.5x maintenance release, which will leverage MS Office 2003; I am particularly taken by Hugh Pyle and company's work at Groove to make MS Sharepoint 2003 and InfoPath dance and sing in Groove 2.5
I think this development foreshadows future synergies between Windows, Applications and Groove Collaboration features; Features like presence, activity and the creation and synchronization of XML forms and data that are stored in SQL accessible data stores can now become commonplace. What a long strange trip it has been.
One need only look at what you have expected personal computers and modern operating systems to deliver, to anticipate what will show up as Groove exposes more and more of its central functions as Groove Web Services, and Microsoft et al. use Groove to leverage their applications.
12:12:56 PM 
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