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 :)

I'm a SharePoint MVP!

Talk about a nice surprise.



I knew I was nominated, but I never figured I'd actually receive a SharePoint MVP award. Of course, I doubt there are too many people not working at Microsoft that know as much about SharePoint and Groove web services and behavior as yours truly. What's more, all of that knowledge has been earned the hard way-- making it work for shipping products.

Call me a curmudgeon still living in the past 5 years, but I actually believe people are just starting to deduce both the benefits of desktop/web synergy and the best way to go about it. In fact, I think the interaction between the desktop and web applications (way beyond the generic web browser) will define the next 5 years or so of computing. Well, that and virtual machines.

So how strong a position is Microsoft in for the next 5 years? Well, they have the best collaboration platforms (SharePoint and Groove), a strong web service strategy and quite possibly the best (potential) virtual machine with .NET.

It's nice to know they like me too :)

Thank you to whomever nominated me and to April over at Microsoft. I really appreciate it.

Bad Sign for Groove?

It's always the little things, isn't it.

I visited the Microsoft Office discussion board yesterday to put in a few posts about our new release. I wrote up a beautiful description of our synchronization between MS Project and Groove-- even brought a tear to me eye :)

But when I attempted to post it, the discussion board required me to select the office discussion group. OK, simple dropdown of all the office apps. Let's see... Groove starts with G... G.... Hmmm... could it be Microsoft Groove? No.... MS Groove... Hmmm... I had to settle for General Office Questions.

There is no Groove topic to be found. There is Visio. I certainly see Excel, Word, Project, etc., but no Groove.

Hopefully its all a simple oversight that, when the person running the office discussion group reads this blog post will slap there head and exclaim 'Ach, voy!'

Connecting Groove with MS Project

Now there's a task for you! Figuring out how to combine a solitary scheduling tool with a highly distributed, cross-firewall collaboration platform (disguised as an Office 2007 application). Thankfully we've been doing this kind of thing since 2003.

Even better, we've just updated our product to make the link between MS Project and Groove event tighter. We've had more than a few customers download our free Groove workspace that includes a Task List. As a result, we've had more than a few customers ask how they can get the tasks they've been working on in Groove in to MS Project. Tasks lists typically start out small, and then grow.

Here's our screencast showing how to create an MS Project plan from a Groove task list. As you can see, it's eerily similar to creating an MS Project plan from a SharePoint task list.

Also like the SharePoint demonstration, you'll notice the 'Add New Tasks Created in Groove' checkbox. This feature allows IntelliGantt to recognize new tasks added via Groove and have them show up in MS Project, ready to be scheduled by the project manager. We feel this will be a handy workflow solution whereby people can enter their tasks or issues and project managers can put them on a timeline.

The free Groove task list has been available for a few months now. I think a few thousand of you are using it. This feature is absolutely compatible with the TeamDirection Groove task list-- you can start using it today (it's almost like we planned it :).

IntelliGantt Add-In for MindManager

Another new product from TeamDirection. It's an Add-In, only this time its for Mindjet's MindManager. Much like our Add-In for MS Project, the IntelliGantt Add-In for MindManager hooks seamlessly into the tool bar (yes, even the new ribbon), lets you publish topics and subtopics to a SharePoint task list and synchronizes everyone's update back into the original map.

If that sentence was a mouthful, check out the screecast and see it in action. In it you will see how we incorporate our nifty task list and interactive gantt chart into the MindManager environment. This lets you easily schedule topics and subtopics to harness and organize out-of-the-box free-form thinking.

What's more, using our IntelliGantt sharing capabilities, its just a couple clicks to share a scheduled map in to a SharePoint or Groove task list. But that's not the end of the story as all IntelliGantt projects maps are bidirectional. This means the topics and subtopics you publish to SharePoint and Groove can be modified by people using only their browser or a Groove client. Best of all, these updates can be incorporated back in to the original map.

If you haven't already, go scroll back up and view the screencast. We're shooting to release it in the near future. If you'd like to test it for yourself, contact sales at teamdirection.com.

The IntelliGantt Add-In for MindManager works with WSS 2.0 and WSS 3.0 (learn what I learned about SharePoint versions). This means it will work with the core (free, as in beer) SharePoint services and the top-of-the-line Portal Servers (2003 and MOSS; not free).

No more import/export, double-entry or other machinations to put your maps into a collaboration system. TeamDirection has made it as easy as drag-n-drop scheduling and 1-2-3 click to share and synchronize with your team.

Project Management with Groove Templates

Though SharePoint gets most of the press, Groove brings a unique set of features to collaboration as well. In fact, it's amazing how similar the SharePoint and Groove platforms are at times and how well they lend themselves to a similar philosophy.

Take templates for example. In my previous post I showed how IntelliGantt Plus can publish and synchronize tasks with SharePoint templates. Not to be outdone, Groove has its own templating system (arguably a bit more simple for the user to work with) and TeamDirection, of course, is happy to build on it.

Here is a screencast showing how to drop the TeamDirection Task List for Groove 2007 in to a standard workspace, save it as a template and use it again when you publish and synchronize your project.

If you have a Groove Forms developer in house, or if you've contacted a consultant, it's terribly easy to drop a TeamDirection Task List into a Groove workspace and gain powerful project management features.

As an added benefit, we've unlocked our forms as well. This means you can actually open up the TeamDirection Task List itself, make a few modifications for your needs and still have the power of IntelliGantt Plus. This Groove Workspace Template ships with IntelliGantt Plus. Head over to TeamDirection and check it out, or go right to the source and try it today.

Now wouldn't it be cool if you could point IntelliGantt Plus to any SharePoint or Groove task list and create a project from it?

Hmmmm.... :)

Project Management with SharePoint Custom Templates

Yes, it's been another quiet period, which can only mean one thing: new features!

We're quite excited about this upcoming release as it gives you more control of your projects, SharePoint and Groove. We're about to introduce the ability to publish projects to SharePoint and Groove based on custom templates. This means if you've got a SharePoint workspace or Groove forms guru in house (or if you've paid an external guru a handsome sum) to customize and personalize workspaces for your needs... you can keep using them. Better yet, feel free to make new ones.

On my techie SharePoint blog I'll go in to the guts a little bit and explain how it works. But here I have a screencast that shows this feature in action. It's just showing SharePoint at this moment, but we will be improving the screencast shortly to show more or less the same thing with Groove forms and workspaces.

This link will take you directly to the SharePoint Custom Template screencast. If it looks easy, its because it is easy.

We've also written up the installation (and uninstallation) instructions so you can see for yourself how straightforward we've made things.

This release has tons more stuff in it (and a few important usability fixes-- no more needing to specify server names when logging in to SharePoint!). Look for email in your inbox announcing it shortly.

IntelliGantt does Groove Workspace Templates

We've been burning the midnight oil lately with our newest features, and with the price of oil being what it is today we decided its time to release another one:

IntelliGantt Plus now lets you specify the Groove Workspace Template to use when creating a new IntelliGantt Project. Anyone interested in Groove Forms development can create a template and then put it into their Groove Workspace Templates directory under My Documents. IntelliGantt will read the templates from this directory and offer them to the user. Here's a screenshot:



This is the first iteration of the feature. Right now if you need the TeamDirection Task List for tracking tasks, you will need to add it yourself to the template-- if our TD Task List is there, IntelliGantt will use it. In the future, we will make it automatic. But we thought the feature would be so nice in the hands of developers who know their vertical domain, but would like a simple task list to track things, that we thought the time was right.

This feature is in the shipping product, so you can download IntelliGantt Plus today and try it with your own template.

But the template vision isn't quite complete yet; SharePoint templates are coming too. We are in QA right now with general availability June 1. Just like Groove, we will query the SharePoint server for a list of all available templates with which to create a workspace. Again, developers can bring their domain knowledge, we connect to the standard SharePoint task list.

SharePoint templates demos coming soon...

Independent Groove User Group Forming

Jim Moffat has taken the initiative and is forming a Groove User Group that looks very interesting. I've joined up and will add what I can. Other prominent Groovers are also coalescing around www.grooveuser.org.

Not to say Microsoft hasn't been pushing Groove hard enough. I'm sure you won't hear anyone say such a thing. I know I'm not going to say Microsoft hasn't been pushing Groove hard enough...

The thing is, it's still a great virtual team solution, but now it has to prove its right to exist within the gargantuan MS Office world. Honestly, Groove could use another zero or two at the end of its install base numbers to become a full-fledged member of MS Office.

But, by providing a still compelling solution for virtual teams, by inspiring enough from its user base to form user groups and maybe even by still having a special place in Ray Ozzie's heart, Groove will get those numbers.

A Note for Groove Project Edition Users

Hello out there!

What a transition it has been since Microsoft purchased Groove way back in March of 2005. I'll bet you can count the number of communication updates regarding your Groove product on one hand.

First of all, I would like to stress that TeamDirection will be supporting TeamDirection tools within Groove Project Edition until June of 2009. I know there are many companies of all sizes currently (happily) using this product. It's one of those software releases that just works. So if you're not in a hurry to upgrade to Groove 2007, I understand.

TeamDirection will make it as easy as possible to continue running your feature-rich Groove 3.x software for a couple years to come. We will also make it as easy as possible when you're ready to move to the Microsoft Office edition of Groove.

One thing you should be aware of, however, is TeamDirection has no plans for adding any more features into the Groove Project Edition set. We are very excited about our product mix going forward, of which Groove is a major part. In addition to Groove, we've been able to bring our years of collaborative experience to other platforms as well.

We've added support for SharePoint 2003 and 2007, and a new creation-- our Internet Workgroup, which incorporates Amazon S3 services to make sharing projects ridiculously easy. Groove 3.x was a great market, but now events have pushed everyone into the even larger Microsoft Office ecosystem.

It will be interesting to see what life is like for the Groove customer base once its multiplied by a few factors.

IntelliGantt FAQ

Thanks for the reception!

"Desktop only" MS Project implementations are much more common than most people think and I can definitely see how this could help many organizations use those licenses more effectively.

Dave Garrett
President and CEO of gantthead.com

We think so too.

In that vein, I'd like to run through a list of frequently asked questions regarding our IntelliGantt Add In for MS Project.

1) Does everybody need MS Project?

No, only the project manager who needs MS Project's robust scheduling, advanced costing and more complex features. Everyone else could use a simple browser to update their SharePoint tasks, or a rich, secure Groove workspace-- but IntelliGantt works with both SharePoint and Groove out of the box with no additional installs. If some people prefer a rich, interactive Gantt chart with cool features like Multi-Project view and Instant Messaging, then I can recommend our standard application for $199.

2) What a second, you mean I don't need to install anything on a server, or update my SharePoint configuration? Not even an ActiveX program?

Correct. IntelliGantt works with the standard, shipping task list for SharePoint 2003 and 2007. Groove 2007 doesn't actually ship with a Task List, so we created a simple Groove Form Task List and give it out for free. And no, there's no ActiveX involved.

3) What versions of MS Project does IntelliGantt work with?

MS Project 2003 and 2007 Standard and Professional.

4) How do my SharePoint users become resources in MS Project?

There are two options. Option one happens during the initial publish, or sharing, of a project. When you publish your project to a SharePoint or Groove workspace, IntelliGantt retrieves the members and inserts them as resources within your project. IntelliGantt then keeps track of the resource/member relationship so you can make changes to names, costing and other fields, but still have the proper connection.

OR, you may want to work from a project template, which may contain resources like 'Developer 1' or 'Engineer 2'. If you give these MS Project resources email address, then when a project is shared or updated, IntelliGantt will see if a member with the same email address is a member in the SharePoint or Groove workspace. If so, a link is created.

In both cases, if you assign an hourly cost to your MS Project resources, and your members update their percent complete, the project manager can see cost information updated as the project executes.

5) I see on your site you also support MindManager. Is there a MindManager Add In?

An Add In for MindManager is coming soon! But we do have MindManager integration available today with our Plus product. This lets you synchronize Topics and SubTopics with your SharePoint and Groove users as well. You can even try it today.

6) What external SharePoint host providers do you work with? Can you recommend one?

We will work with any Windows SharePoint Services V2 or V3 provider. Our goal is to work with as many as possible, and partner with the ones that make sense.

7) In addition to SharePoint and Groove, the demo also showed 'Internet Workgroup'. What is an Internet Workgroup?

You will have to wait a week or so before I can answer that one. But I can promise you it'll be worth the suspense!

8) OK, how much?

$299 for a single license. This is an insanely great deal in that one license lets a project manager interactively share tasks with all the members of a team, lets a team use a simple browser to report progress and raise issues and gives a window to management what's going on.

I'll be able to provide more information as we get closer to release, which is getting closer by the day.

Again, thank you all for your interest in IntelliGantt.

IntelliGantt Add In for Microsoft Project in Action

Sure I posted a couple of screenshots of our new Add In for Microsoft Project (standard or professional), but here it is in action. Mind you, this is not available yet. As a reader of this blog, you get a sneak preview! But, hopefully next week, the whole world gets to download and try it out for themselves.



I should also warn you this demo has an audio track narrated by yours truly, but don't let that dissuade you.

Feel free to comment on what you see, or shoot me an email if you want more information, or just want to be alerted when this product becomes available.

The Add In that Tied MS Project, SharePoint and Groove Together

[October 2008 Update - New, Improved BETA Available!]

Deep in the TeamDirection labs a new product is taking shape. It's goal, unify Microsoft Collaboration with an out of the box solution.

Here's how it will work:

TeamDirection's IntelliGantt Add In will add an extra set of menu options for Microsoft Project Standard or Professional.



This intelligent feature will let you share your tasks to a SharePoint 2003 or 2007 system, or to a Groove 2007 system. Right out of the box. No installation on the SharePoint server is required. No installation for Internet Explorer required. Your team members can use out of the box Microsoft tools to view their tasks and update them.

For instance, here's a standard SharePoint workspace with tasks published from MS Project:



And here is what that same task list might look like after your team members reported their progress:



Finally, at the project manager's discretion, the tasks are synchronized back with the original project. Afterwards, MS Project reflects the state of the project, as updated by users via their SharePoint workspace:



It's all in a day's work!

[UPDATE -- It's Available! Check out a few of the demos and give it a 15-day free trial today.]

Comparing Project Server and TeamDirection Project 2007

And this would be elephant number two in the room. While I could blithely write how we do this and how project server does that and we both do the online web-based project thing in perfect harmony....

I would be lying.

OK, I admit it. TeamDirection Plus 2007 is providing a nice, simple way to connect your MS Project projects to MS SharePoint. Project Server does it by requiring several components, lots of consulting time and training. We do it by selling TeamDirection Project Plus 2007 for $549.

For that price you get:

1. A desktop app your project manager can install and start sharing tasks in 5 minutes or less.
2. A flexible bidirectional synchronization that updates data from MS Project to SharePoint, and from SharePoint to MS Project with one click.
   
3. The ability to not only share entire projects, but parts of a project. Have a project with 1,000 tasks but only want to share 100 of them? We can do that.
4. Rich integration with a great project conceptualization-- Mindjet MindManager-- and a cutting edge collaboration tool-- MS Groove 2007.
5. Multiple project view letting you see many projects at once in a grid and gantt. And foldering to let your organize your projects.
   
6. A nice UI, integrated Instant Messaging, Resource that can not only be assigned to tasks but also inherit their permissions from SharePoint or Groove, simple costing and more...
   

Normally I wouldn't point out in my blog where we compete with Microsoft-- I am in Seattle after all. But really, there's lots of companies that both compete and partner with them. We are no different. For instance, as I mentioned, we also talk to MS Groove 2007-- one of the first companies to do so. We've leveraged our rich history with Groove and its Project Edition and created an excellent solution for the next generation.

In fact, I can make a claim: TeamDirection Project 2007 is the only project application in the world that lets you share MS Project plans with SharePoint and Groove. Hopefully that makes the SharePoint and Groove groups at Microsoft happy. I even think it will make members of the Project team happy because it gives smaller companies-- and departments within large companies-- more flexibility and power for project managers to use the richness of MS Project and the distribution of SharePoint and Groove.

And if they see a grumpy member from the Project Server team, tell him or her its ok to share.

Microsoft Groove Case Study with TeamDirection

Microsoft has just posted a somewhat repackaged case study for Groove, TeamDirection and Steelcase. It's actually based on the Groove 3.x system, but its been a nice customer solution for everyone involved.

The bottom line:

Steelcase groups using Groove Virtual Office (and TeamDirection!) saved up to 10 percent on project costs by reducing travel expenses and increasing productivity.

I think the same type of solution will also work very well for SharePoint users too.

Installing Desktop Apps vs. Installing Web Apps

Who wants to download a 15MB installation file and take 5 minutes to install a classic desktop application? Especially when its so easy to point a web browser to a super spiffy web application. For instance, I could download and install a desktop collaboration tool like Groove-- which used to come in around 30MB or so before it became 'Officized.' Or I could just use a SharePoint server and my browser, which saves me the trouble, right?


Right. But did you ever wonder how many bytes that web application might take? IE7 has a nifty feature that allows you to save a web page to your local disk in a single file that contains everything the web page needs to render. I tried it on the standard SharePoint 2003 entry page for a document workspace. I saved it and noted it took 715K. Other than about 10 members, this was basically a stock document workspace page. 715K.

Let's see, 30MB / 715K == about 42. Other than being a most amazing coincidence in the universe of Douglas Adams, it means once I've look at a SharePoint document workspace page 43 times I've actually downloaded more bytes than it would have taken to install a comparable desktop based collaboration tool.

Curious.

What do you think the sum byte total of all web application page views are? Doesn't it strike you as similar to uninstalling an old mini-app and installing new mini-application with each URL click? Could there be a tipping point where it actually makes more sense to install a desktop app? Perhaps Douglas Adams knew something we didn't and 42 really is the answer.

For whatever reason, the browser has been able to better define application installation/uninstallation than the operating system. And its such a huge, overwhelming advantage that entire industries are making fortunes exploiting the gap.

Sooner or later the old dog will have to learn a new trick.

A Face For Radio, A Voice For Writing

Just created a couple of flash demos for our beta narrated by yours truly. It was fun. Trying to distill an incredibly powerful feature into 20 or so shots with a crisp storyline and helpful commentary was a bit more difficult than I thought. Throw in a sore throat, lots of tea and a few lozenges and you get two demos.

Sorry about the voice, though. Would you believe I took an acting class while in college? Amazingly enough, I actually remembered a few of the ennunciation exercises. Who knew it would come in handy as a senior architect at a software firm.

Demo #1 shows TeamDirection publishing MindManager topics and subtopics to a SharePoint server-- and a hosted one at that (free publicity for you, Apptix). Team members then use their browser to update an assigned task in the task list. TeamDirection gathers the latest data and reports back to MindManager. We still have to package it nicely with our site layout, but you can get a direct, sneak peak here.

Demo #2 is similar, but this time TeamDirection publishes MS Project tasks and subtasks to a Groove workspace. Groove doesn't actually ship with a Task List, so TeamDirection provides one for you. It's similar to the SharePoint Task List, and only people with proper permissions can update their tasks. Once again, TeamDirection gathers the latest data and reports back to MS Project. Again, nice packaging to follow, but you can get a direct, sneak peak here.

These demos show TeamDirection Project Plus 2007. If you like what you see, go download the beta here and share a task or topic today.

And to show our appreciation for taking the time try out our beta, we are providing a special discount. Its weighted such that the sooner you try the beta, the better the discount will be when you purchase.

I know it will start at 30% on Nov 6, and decrease 1 basis point per day until we release. I'll update this post as soon as I know the link.

Thanks to everyone for making this a great product!

MS Project, MindJet, SharePoint and Groove Interconnected

Doesn't seem possible, does it? How can four very different applications work together?

With one unique application.



TeamDirection Project 2007 has the robustness of an athlete, the wherewithal of a concierge and the communication skills of a diplomat. But perhaps most importantly it brings project management to a more human level.

We realize there are people involved in projects. This is why we integrated Instant Messaging right into the project view. We made it behave very similarly to SharePoint integration with MS Office apps so SharePoint (and Groove) users will be right at home.

But the real benefits are for team members who don't need a project management tool. Rather, they just need their browsers to point to SharePoint workspaces. Or if they have the newest MS Office family member, Groove 2007, then join Groove workspaces that take advantage of forms. The important thing is these team members need no additional software to participate in the project and complete their tasks.

We also aim to make the project manager's life a little better too. It's now very easy to move data from MS Project into TeamDirection, and from TeamDirection back to MS Project. Not import/export, but full synchronization. And not necessarily the entire project.

For example, while a project manager may be perfectly at home in a 1000 task project, sometimes its easier for a team to work on smaller pieces. TeamDirection Project lets the project manager identify a summary task as the piece of the project to share. Once in the TeamDirection system, we maintain a link to the summary task's origin and allow it to be published to either SharePoint Task Lists or Groove Task Lists. TeamDirection Project will then gather task data as people update their assigned tasks and synchronize that data with original summary task (and its children) in MS Project. It may sound difficult, but we've got it down to two clicks.

The result is any summary task can become a shared task list.

And not just MS Project summary tasks, but also topics and subtopics. The observant readers may have recognized the simple diagram above as a MindMap. We've found MindJet's MindManager is not only a great way to conceptualize a project but a powerful way to communicate it to a broad audience. TeamDirection Project takes it one step further-- it gives you a simple way to connect projects and tasks to individual team members, through SharePoint and Groove, so you can now execute and track them too.

Finally, we've made a few project management enhancements we're proud of. Things like an improved, interactive Gantt chart and a better Task grid. Useful features like multi-level undo, multi-project views with filtering, a very handy project organizer to group projects and 'smart folders' to quickly identify late ones.

Our philosophy at TeamDirection is 'The Right Tool for the Job.' We could spend years trying to make a project management solution do everything anybody ever wanted. But then it would end up looking something like this.

We believe in the right tool for the job. One of our jobs is making project management easy, accessible and useful. But our other job is to make sure the task data you need is in the application you want. MS Project, MindJet, SharePoint and Groove are a few such applications, but there are many more out there. Most of the world's projects are started with Excel. More and more task lists are executed with next generation web applications like BaseCamp and @Task. TeamDirection helps you make sure your projects are completed with the right tool for the right audience.

A Great PMI Show

The booth is in the car, the staff is back at work, the show is over. It went better than I expected. We've been at the last three PMI Global Congress shows (Baltimore, Anaheim and Seattle) and this was definitely our best. Probably because now we have our best product. Just about every demo I gave went really well. However, I did notice three things:

1) People who see or read about TeamDirection Project see our integration with SharePoint, but make the assumption that we only store project files on the SharePoint server and share those. While we do store a project file on the SharePoint site, we also synchronize information with the standard SharePoint Task List that team members can update with their browsers-- including Safari for Mac users.

Invariably, once I show this feature people's eyes light up and they respond 'so you're just like Project Server!' As far as interacting with SharePoint task lists, yes. But to compare TeamDirection Project to Project Server is like comparing a hybrid car to an 18 wheeler. Yes they both have wheels, but we focus more on executing the tasks at hand whereas Project Server is the entire enterprise solution.

Still, the basics are the same: distributing and updating tasks with a web browser.

2) We think one of our coolest features is the integrated Instant Messaging window showing each team members presence. This lets you instant message a team member whose task might have fallen behind and ask what's going on. Or its a good way to notify your team of any changes to the plan. When I point this out, people agree its very useful. But I think we might be able to do more to show how the instant member list can be the same as your team member list. Maybe a presence ball right next to the assignment info? It's definitely a valuable feature to help project managers stay in touch with their team.

I think a couple of simple flash demos on our site will help convey these features. Time to put the director hat back on for a bit.

3) What is up with Microsoft and Groove? I was very surprised at how few people knew about Groove. Microsoft bought Groove back in March 2005. It's rolling Groove into the next version of Office. Ray Ozzie is now the Chief Architect at Microsoft. I thought Groove awareness would have doubled or tripled by now. It's a very powerful solution and, surprising as it may sound, Microsoft seems to be underselling it right now. Perhaps things will change once Office 2007 ships.

Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and made the show such a success for us. A special thanks to everyone who told their friends and colleagues we deserve a visit. The last day of the show was actually our busiest, which I chalk up to the word getting around.

See you at the next show!