What I Would Do With Groove

I've been getting great feedback from my previous post spawned by Groove angst. It does seem like Groove is at an inflection point and, given the state of things today, hard to see how it captures the imagination. As Don Dodge likes to put it, not only is Groove a vitamin and not painkiller, but its unclear what vitamins and minerals are even in the Groove pill.

Given that, I think it's time to dream again. After all, if you asked any Groover back in, say, 2004 if 'Offline SharePoint Cache' was their vision I doubt they would have had kind words for you.

So now in 2008, as part of the world's greatest Office Suite, don't you think its OK to be a bit more expansive? Putting on my virtual 'Chief Software Architect' hat, here's what I would do: mimic SharePoint not by copying data locally and pushing it back but by copying their architecture model.

Web Parts and Web Services

Here's a secret-- SharePoint is not concerned so much about the UI experience as it is about the data experience. Yes there are some nice icons and the color scheme is pleasing, but I'm confident SharePoint out-of-the-box won't be pushing the UI design and interaction experience. They'd much rather developers and ISVs flesh that out because, in addition to making things look pretty, they most likely also specialize their solutions for more specific business needs than a mass-market SharePoint product can do out-of-the-box.

So they have a Web Part architecture that folks like Bamboo Solutions (one of our partners) can develop against and users can drop in to their SharePoint environment.

And they have a Web Service architecture that folks like TeamDirection can use to send data back and forth from client to server and do interesting things with.

As a developer, it really is a Model View Controller architecture with the three elements being three applications working together according to contract.

If Groove is looking to copy SharePoint, then this is what it needs to copy. Better yet, because it's on the client, it will be able to do a few things only a client application can do-- most importantly integrate with data on your desktop, but also providing a rich visual experience.

Here's the vision:

No more effort with Groove Forms. No need to reinvent the arduous aspects of HTML form development on the client. Instead...

Go to Silverlight as the UI within the Groove client. This will let you leverage the current investment Microsoft is making to build a generation of Silverlight programmers. But add a wrinkle...

Make Groove a Special Silverlight Container that gives permission for Silverlight to integrate with the desktop. This allows Groove to become the world's best Rich Internet Application delivery platform. Which is great as long as you don't forget to..

Continually invest in Groove Web Services so that developers can easily pump desktop data in and out of these Rich Internet Applications and tie their current business processes together.

I am not saying Groove shouldn't talk to SharePoint. Groove needs to talk to SharePoint for SharePoint will be the way business will organize their data and processes.

But Groove's opportunity is just as big, only instead of coalescing data and process according to the macro business needs, Groove can coalesce data and process according to the micro Information Workers needs. Perhaps its a bit trite, but I do think Groove fits very well in line with Microsoft's former 'Information at your fingertips', current 'your potential' and general 'empower the user' vision.

There's nothing wrong with going back to your roots. You just have to re-dream it sometimes.

Ruminations on SharePoint and Groove

One of the great things about being a Microsoft MVP is the chance to go to the MVP Global Summit. Microsoft essentially takes the most knowledgable, most active and most vocal people in to answer lots of questions, preview what they're working on and shower you with positive vibes. The cynic would say its only smart tactics (which it is :), but judging by all the product teams representatives-- both the presenters and the note takers-- I certainly came away with the impression they listen to and value feedback.

Without going in to specifics, one of the more contentious issues seemed to be how SharePoint and Groove will work together. As Internet News reported of Ray Ozzie's and Steve Ballmer's speeches, they both received 'what about Groove' questions during their Q&A. Again without going in to details, the Groove folks are not enthusiastic on what is happening today and what is planned for tomorrow.

Of course, this shouldn't come as a surprise if you read this blog for TeamDirection was the premier Groove ISV with its bundled Groove Project Edition. The fact that I attended the conference as a SharePoint MVP is probably all I really need to say.

But I can't help myself.

Groove’s strength is its decentralized architecture, which should be the perfect complement to SharePoint’s centralized architecture. Two people gave me perfect examples of this during the conference: Matt, a SharePoint MVP I sat next to at several SharePoint sessions and Steve Ballmer. The example was being able to suck all the information from disparate sources onto your personal device and keep it synchronized.

Fundamentally this is a powerful architecture because it can centralize data on your desktop-- the flip side of SharePoint powerful architecture centralizing data on your server. In fact, it used to be Groove could house the .NET framework in its environment and thereby give developers a rich user experience with sophisticated peer-to-peer networking for gathering and updating all this data. I'd even go so far as to argue that Groove, because of its ActiveX and then .NET support, was a compelling vision of a Rich Internet Application framework.

Yes, I did say 'was', for you'll notice that the .NET framework is no longer accessible within Groove and their forms environment is too primitive for robust development. As a developer, I would love to see .NET reappear within Groove and give me the ability to integrate with desktop applications and the powerful peer-to-peer workgroup synchronization.

It doesn't even have to be Windows Forms as the UI. I'm most impressed with Silverlight and think that should be bolted on to Groove as a means to marry a better Rich Internet Application solution with a great distributed synchronization solution.

Think about it-- a unified model for accessing centralized (SharePoint) or decentralized (Groove) data with a common Rich UI tailored to the groups needs. In fact, Groove can enhance Silverlight in two important ways:

1) It could facilitate data synchronization among a group of Silverlight users without having to poll a central server.
2) It could be a recognized 'Safehouse' whereby Silverlight would be allowed to access local resources. That is, the one place where Silverlight will let you access local resources like your file system or other application interfaces.

What's the one complaint RIA developers have? You can't do anything with the local resources. How much of an advantage (and selling point) would it be if Groove could fulfill this story? I'm looking forward to providing Silverlight solutions married to SharePoint as a means bring value add to my customers working on a SharePoint hub. But I'd love to be able to take, more or less, the same UI, plonk it into a Groove spoke and provide uniformity for ad-hoc workgroups too.

I think you could even pitch 'RIA Safety Zone' in an elevator :)

Bamboo Showing IntelliGantt at SharePoint Conference

If you happen to be in Nashville, Tennessee this week, have heard about SharePoint but are more interested in the real world than bits and bytes, you should check out the SharePoint Information Worker Conference being held at the Gaylord Opryland.

The folks at Bamboo Solutions were kind enough to take a few copies of IntelliGantt Plus along with them to demonstrate what a nice solution project publishing from TeamDirection and Project Aggregation from Bamboo can do for your project managers and teams.

Stop by the booth for a hands on demo. Better yet, try a trial of IntelliGantt Plus and Project.Share for IntelliGantt and see how it works for you.

How to invite IntelliGantt users from a SharePoint web page

We're hearing more and more customers ask questions about how they may put IntelliGantt project files up on SharePoint so that everyone can work from the same copy. We're pleased to surprise them when we answer that IntelliGantt is already doing this for them.

The usage scenario is as follows:

A project manager publishes a project from MS Project or from IntelliGantt Plus to SharePoint. Let's take the simple project shown below:



After publishing, IntelliGantt fills out the task list so that the project on your desktop and the task list on your SharePoint server are in sync. But notice there has been an additional modification to the Shared Documents web part on the SharePoint site:



If we click on the 'TeamDirection' folder in the Shared Documents web part we see the following:



The folder with the long, ugly (but unique! :) name is where the shared copy of your IntelliGantt project data lives. IntelliGantt uses the files in this folder to merge and synchronize all your changes (and makes for a great backup-- a users machine might blow up, but all they'd need is to click on the invite file to catch to up where the group is).

It's the file with the box around it that we want. This is an invitation file. By default, it is the name of the project. However, notice the full URL at the bottom of the image? It ends with .tdiconnect. TDIConnect files are the invitation glue that allow multiple IntelliGantt users to work and collaborate together on the same project. It's also the same file that is attached to the emails sent to users inviting them to the workspace.

A user might navigate to this folder and click on the invite file. Or, the site admin might put a link to the invite file in the links web part like so:



This puts the invite file front and center on the SharePoint workspaces home page for easy access:



At this point, the project is shared via SharePoint and is represented in the SharePoint task list for any SharePoint user to view and update. And the invite file is also available for any IntelliGantt user to join the 'behind-the-scenes' project to see a rich desktop view. For example, here Julia has clicked on the invite file and has joined the project:







This situation is also ideal if the user is a member of the project, needs to take it offline and update outside the office, return to the office and synchronize changes. This means a project team can really be a mix of project managers, SharePoint only users and mobile IntelliGantt users in and out of the office.

Vicarious Travel, Part II

My friend is at it again. There's a few perks to being young and mobile.

This time it's Costa Rica and Hermosa beach for a month of surfing. Well, he says he will be working on his Trileet games, but come on... please!

How can you think of surfing with all these deadlines? Deadlines, Nic, Deadlines!

MOSS and Task Integration Article Published

SharePoint Beagle's latest issue came out and it includes an article I wrote. No surprise, but its all about project management and SharePoint, how easy SharePoint makes it to collaborate with your project team and the tools you can use.

The short summary is Outlook and IntelliGantt work great for both the team member and the project manager. Read the article (and notice the accompanying pictures) and see what you think.

A Quick Review of our Licensing

Sometimes the industry has conditioned consumers to such an extent that they assume the worst case-- no matter what. As much as we'd love to be a money-grubbing mega-corp fleecing the ma and pop shops of the world, the reality is we're the mom and pop shop and we're trying to bring the best value possible to other ma/pa shops AND even big mega-corps.

The way we do that is two-fold. One is philosophical, the other is grounded in easy economics. Let's tackle philosophy first.

Quick question-- why do most projects fail? The answer: communication. Lack of communication. Disjoint communication. Half-hearted communication. Meaningless communication. You get the idea.

If communication is improved, project success rates will improve.

IntelliGantt improves communication by making everyone a full participant in the project. It encourages the project manager to share project plans and team members to easily see their tasks, update them and even reschedule things if settings allow. Our 'Local Workgroup' solution enables this with Windows Server machines you most likely already have. Our friendly UI invites even the most jaded curmudgeon-- people like me :)

The 'Local Workgroup' scenario requires everyone using a copy of IntelliGantt on their desktop. The question, of course, is 'can't I do this with an online solution?'

On to the economics.

Yes, most certainly you can. However, unlike an online solution, you only pay for the IntelliGantt solution once. We don't require monthly fees to keep everyone involved. As you can see from our comparison with eProject (now Daptiv?), monthly fees for each user can really add up!

What's more, we even support a scenario where only one person, typically the project manager, needs an IntelliGantt license-- our SharePoint scenario.

Whether you're a ma/pa shop or the world's largest corporation, everyone likes to make a smart decision and save a buck. With SharePoint core services (WSS 3.0) you get a great collaboration platform from Microsoft FOR FREE! WSS 3.0 is perfect for creating workspaces for your team to work on projects. If only there was project software that could make it easy to publish and update task schedules in SharePoint...

Hello IntelliGantt Plus!

In the hands of the project manager, IntelliGantt Plus can publish and synchronize most aspects of a project plan with SharePoint workspaces and specifically Task Lists. Better yet, economically speaking, the project manager can purchase 1 license of IntelliGantt Plus (or the IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project), use the FREE WSS 3.0 package and invite as many team members to the workspace as he or she wants.

For example, say the project manager of the US Government creates a SharePoint workspace and publishes a project plan. In licensing theory, the project manager could invite every employee of the federal government to this workspace and all they would need is one license of IntelliGantt Plus. In fact, they could go ahead and invite all the citizens too :)

Improved communication and insanely great economics. Now that is a good deal!