One of our companies has a hugely distributed staff. One of their biggest problems has been collaborating with each other to get things done. Email had been the biggest workhorse in the battle, but that adds a ton of complexity to the situation. There were so many multiple versions of documents it took a lot of time to sort out the changes.

Also, important items were being discussed by email and these items affected everyone, yet, not everyone could see the discussion. Worse, the snippets they did get were out of context. That alone caused some animosity between staff when their really wasn’t anything to get anxious over. The context was missing and therefore the snippets fit in where ever the person receiving them perceived them to be. You know as well as I do how some folks can stretch their imaginations to incredible lengths to encompass the most outlandish theories.

Enter the Groove. Groove 2007 is a product that I had used in the past with limited success. The product itself was awesome! So good that Microsoft picked it up and put it in its pockets. The problem was usage. As with product or service, how well it goes off depends not only on its pros and cons, but also on how much time is spent using the system. This enterprise spent a ton of money to make Groove available across the enterprise, however, $0 were spent on training. No time was spent getting peeps up to speed on it, it was just dished out. It has become shelfware. Almost no one uses it. On my team, I was the only person that used it consistently.

In the two weeks since we’ve deployed Groove, we have sent everyone through some of the smaller training exercises and they see where we are trying to go. More and more, we see things being added to the Groove workspaces and even more workspaces popping up! I had wondered if SharePoint was a better way to go, and the jury is still out on that one, but things are getting done faster, with greater efficiency, and gone is the effort to cobble a couple of different edits across multiple documents back into the working one.

All in all, things are Groovy!