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- Working with the Groove Client
- The Groove Client Possibilities
- Groove Accounts and Identities
- The World of Groove Development
- The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Groovers
- Groove in a Nutshell
This chapter is from the book
The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Groovers
Mark Ryan (technical specialist, Microsoft Office Groove 2007, Microsoft Business Division) listed his top ten habits for Groove on his blog at http://marktryan.spaces.live.com/blog/:
- I was packing to go to Milan tomorrow and the phone rang - A Microsoft partner, who is rolling out a large deployment of Groove for an Enterprise customer, was calling to see if I had any "Best Practices" in using Groove that I could share. I did so I will now share them with you:
- Groove Workspaces are a tremendously powerful tool for supporting collaboration across domains and businesses, but we should be conscious the fact that the tool is as good as it's users and we need to add some "house rules: to make it work effectively. Here are some things to consider:
- All members can read everything. If you don't want someone to see something, don't invite them in.
- Information Rights Management (IRM) will prevent unauthorized access to documents in Groove; so, if you have a connection to the IRM-issuing AD domain, you can use the document as your rights permit.
- Be careful to whom you allow "invite" permissions. If you don't personally know them, think about it!
- Groove is a great security and transport container, but its version control is not sophisticated. Make your own folders and copy docs in there for editing, switch on version tracking in Word, for example, and when you are ready the space manager can merge versions using Word.
- Talk to each other—phone, email, IM, and Groove messages are great ways to agree who should be doing what—it's more human and very democratic to discuss how revisions should be made.
- If you don't want a doc to sync, put it in a new folder and turn off "synchronization" RH click the folder and click Properties tab, click the Synchronization tab, and set to Manual. When you're ready to share, switch it back to Automatic.
- Try and invite your membership in before adding too much content; this makes the joining process quicker for the members. Then add your content a little at a time. Groove has excellent compression algorithms which work best on smaller chunks. As Groove is going to attempt to serialize the data into 1MB chunks anyway, you may as well help the process.
- As the workspace manager, it's your "private club," so why not use the Notepad tool to create a "Welcome" or "About" page where you can outline the do's and don'ts, working practices, and maybe some useful links. This is a good way to induct new members into the workspace.
- Remember F7 checks spelling! Make yourself look good!
- Pressing the "Shift" twice in quick succession invokes the Send Groove Message dialog, even if Groove is running in the background.