Groove - Is Anybody At MS Actually Still Developing It?

[SteveM]

On the Groove Advisor website, http://blogs.technet.com/groove/default.aspx,
there is a listing of "Friends" Here is the last Groove related
activity posted by each:

Marc Olson's Groove 2007 Blog - January 26, 2006
Ray Ozzie's Blog - Not Accesible
Mark Ryan's Blog - May 6, 2008
Hugh Pyle's Blog - January 24, 2008, prior to that - June 21, 2007
Chris Norman's Blog - December 19, 2006
Michael Gannotti's Blog - May 11, 2007
Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Blog - March 10, 2005
James O'Neill's Blog - May 15, 2006
Laurent Kempe's Blog - November 16, 2005

I was generous with the dates as some of the postings are merely
announcements of tutorials or training. This extremely low level of
activity by what I can reasonably infer are supposed to be the true
advocates for the product, naturally makes me want to ask a question
about whether there is any real interest in Groove by Microsoft at
all?

I have the product. It works okay. But it is a memory hog. The
customization process is too complicated. And as an independent
consultant, I am still trying to figure out a way of sticking my
clients with the annual license for a product they will not use
without my support.

The siren call of open source is beckoning me right now. Because I
still have not been able ascertain any compelling value prop for
Groove even though I own it.

Can somebody on this forum persuade me otherwise?

Thanks,

SteveM

 

[Don]

I just bought a dozen of standalone Groove 2007 licenses for less than $130
each under a MS Open Licensing Agreement. As I understand it, these licenses
are good until MS stops support for Groove 2007, and I don't have to pay any
annual fees. I don't see how $130 = "sticking my clients" when they can
likely use the software for several years. So 4 years = $35/yr roughly?
Sorry, but that's not even close to "sticking it" to anybody who can afford
to otherwise pay for IT consulting. We've used 3.1 for 3-4 years now and had
only paid a single non-recurring fee for each license. I have not personally
found an opensource product that has the same capabilities, that is, one in
which someone else (Microsoft) is running the redundant relay servers 24/7 to
keep my online / offline communications in sync between my 12 users, all of
whom are in different physical locations. If you find someone with a similar
product running free relays with some kind of SLA, then I'd be interested,
otherwise, I'll keep Grooving. Now on the other hand, if you're talking
about Microsoft's hosted Groove solution, where you pay an annual fee, I
would never do that because I don't want all of my info floating out
somewhere, even if it is encrypted. And I also don't like paying annual fees
for anything. So maybe you need to look into the Open Licensing Program.
You can get Groove for less than $130 from almost any national OLP vendor.

Now I do agree that it would be nice to get some more blog info going from
the MS peeps....so how about it guys...maybe you should be updating your
blogs at least monthly.

 

[xsvtoys]

The lack of communication doesn't give you much faith does it? To me, one of
the big telling signs was the launch of Groove 2007 after MS acquired Groove.
It brings absolutely no new functionality to the 3.1 version (which we are
currently on). Other than various features realted to Exchange servers and
Sharepoint.

Here is a big clue: We are small, we DON'T WANT servers with Exchange and
Sharepoint!! Thus the whole point of setting up Groove! It allows us to
accomplish much of the same work without all of that expensive and
time-consuming server technology!

After thinking about this for a long time now, I have come to a conclusion.
I think MS spied Groove on the market as it was launched and started to grow,
and realized it was a threat to services like Sharepoint. There are huge
numbers of small companies that could get by just great on a product like
Groove and never need those server services. Given this threat, they did the
logical thing - they simply threw money at the founders and bought it out,
and now it will be buried.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no good alternative that is available as
of now. So here we all are - stuck.