A Sample Office Groove 2007 Work Session

One of the great things about Office Groove 2007 is that it provides your team with a place to work whether you are all online at the same time or not. When you’re offline, other team members can post and update files, send you messages, and continue to work on projects. When you log onto Office Groove 2007, all the changes will be downloaded to your PC automatically so you can review them—whenever and wherever that might be. This section explores some of the ways you can use Office Groove 2007 in a typical work session.

When you first sign on to Office Groove 2007, a number of text alerts might appear above the Office Groove 2007 icon in your Windows system tray, letting you know quickly which of your workspaces have the information and whether new messages have been delivered (see Figure 11-13). Clicking on workspace alerts will take you directly into the workspace and to the new information. Additionally, you can see quickly in the Launchbar which workspaces have unread content and how many team members are actively working in your workspaces (meaning that they have the workspace window open on their PCs).

Sending Messages in Office Groove 2007

You can send quick messages to Office Groove 2007 users by double-clicking the contact name in the Launchbar Contacts tab of any workspace (see Figure 11-14). Type your note in the Send Message window and click Files if you want to send along an attachment. Additionally, you can copy others on the message by clicking Add More. Click Send to send the message and an alert pops up on the recipient’s desktop to let them know they have received a message from you.

Office Groove 2007 uses alerts to keep you informed about the status of the message you sent, which is especially helpful when you are working with time-critical information and want to know that another team member received the data you are sending. An alert lets you know when the message is sent, received, and even when the recipient opens it (see Figure 11-15).

Working with Alerts

When you log on to Office Groove 2007, you know immediately whether any changes have been made to the information in your workspace. Depending on your alert settings, you’ll receive pop-up text alerts in your Windows task bar, as well as various unread content icons in your Launchbar workspaces tab, which signify how recently your workspaces have been updated. Although Office Groove 2007 will send you pop-up alerts only on the workspaces you use most often, it’s best to customize your alert settings so that you are notified whenever content changes or events are added to the workspaces that are most important to you.

Alerts are fully customizable so that you can change the alert level and turn them on and off according to your preferences. You can determine how “sensitive” you want the alert system to be by indicating which events you want to be informed about—perhaps you want to know only when files are uploaded, or when a team member posts a question, or when SharePoint files have been modified. Alerts are enabled by default when you create a new workspace; if you want to disable them, click Turn Off Alerts in the Common Tasks area of the Launchbar.

To customize alerts for each workspace, right-click on the workspace from the Launchbar and choose Set Alerts (see Figure 11-16). You can then change the workspace alert level from Auto to High, Medium, or Low and also choose to be alerted when any new members enter the workspace—a helpful option when you’re waiting on a time-critical update.

Reviewing Files

As you work in an Office Groove 2007 workspace, you can easily review modified files and post new ones. Open the workspace and click the Files tool to see the files that show a small unread icon to the left of the file name; this identifies them as unread (see Figure 11-17).

To view a file, you simply double-click it. The file opens in the application in which it was created. You can modify the file as needed. When finished, click Save and close the application. The next step is most important. Office Groove 2007 will prompt you to either save your changes over the existing file or to create a new version of the file. When doing a structured document review, it’s best to save it as a new version and give it a descriptive title. After you save your changes, the file will be marked as Unread on your team members’ copies of the workspace.

Chatting in Office Groove 2007

The chat feature in Office Groove 2007 is a simple, fast, and powerful feature that enables you to ask quick questions and get the answers you need from your team members while you’re working in the project workspace. You can type in the Chat area in the navigation pane on the right side of the workspace window or you can click the Open Chat In A New Window tool to expand the Chat area and get additional tools for working with chat.

To begin chatting, click the up arrows on the right side of the Chat pane title bar. Click in the text box and type your message; then click the Send Chat Entry button or press Enter (see Figure 11-18). The text appears in the area above the text entry box. All members of the workspace who are currently online and logged into Office Groove 2007 will receive a pop-up alert that you are chatting in the workspace, and they can join you with a click of the mouse. They’ll then see your text and be able to respond accordingly.

Viewing, Searching, and Printing Chat Transcripts Your chat conversations are automatically saved in chat transcripts so that you can review them at any time. Click the Options button or press Shift+F10 to display the menu; point to Chat and choose among the Find In Transcript, Print Transcript, or Delete Transcript options. [View full size image]

2007 Microsoft Office System Behind-the-Scenes Interview Ryan Hoppe, Office Groove 2007 Product Manager What are your favorite features in Office Groove 2007? Without question, my favorite new feature in Office Groove 2007 is the SharePoint Files tool. The standard Files tool is ideal for working collaboratively with your team members on one or more files. But the challenge is, how do you then share what you’ve developed in Office Groove 2007 with a larger group of people? With the new SharePoint Files tool, you can “publish” your final documents, either to a Windows SharePoint Services teamsite or to Office SharePoint Server 2007, with just a couple mouse clicks. This way, the work you do among your small project team in Groove workspaces becomes part of the corporate record without a lot of overhead. Who do you envision average Office Groove 2007 users to be and what are they trying to accomplish? Pretty much anyone who works with information and relies on other people to get their jobs done can gain value from Office Groove 2007. But of course, the people who will gain the most value from the product are those that work on a number of team projects with people inside and outside organizations, and may sometimes be working while disconnected from a network. For example, a marketing manager who travels frequently and works with a number of external vendors like public relations firms or advertising agencies. Or a sales rep who often works from customer sites and works with various partners to respond to new opportunities. In these cases, the key challenge is that the team is not always connected to the same network and systems. Office Groove 2007 becomes the “glue” that connects these cross-organizational, mobile teams together -- effortlessly. What type of feedback led you to realize a product like Office Groove 2007 was needed? How long has the program been in development? Office Groove 2007 was actually conceived way back in 1997 by Ray Ozzie, now a CTO with Microsoft. At the time, Ray and the Groove development team realized that the workplace was changing from a purely centralized environment to more of a decentralized environment. A number of trends were fueling this change such as outsourcing, partnering, telework, an increase in travel, and a general desire to tighten connections across the value chain. Nearly 10 years later, the decentralized work environment Ray and his team foresaw has become reality. Groove was conceived from the bottom up to support this new work environment. The goal was to make a product that allowed teams to work together easily and effectively regardless of what company they work for, where they might be connecting from, or what kind of data they need to share. What has it been like for you to be part of such a major release? It’s been quite challenging, thrilling, and rewarding to participate in the launch of Office 2007. One of the original goals of Groove Networks back in 1997 was to achieve ubiquity. Success meant having all information workers using and gaining value from Groove on a daily basis. With Office Groove 2007 included in 2007 Microsoft Office Enterprise, which is the most comprehensive suite, the product and its new and improved capabilities will be exposed to such a wide audience. I’m really looking forward to the launch and the opportunity to speak directly to our new customers and learn how the product has helped them overcome their collaborative business challenges. Do you have any fun or interesting stories (or surprising features/ tips or tricks/) you’d like to add? Many customers in the past have expressed the need for file versioning in Groove. This is a challenge, because one of the major benefits of Office Groove 2007 is the ability to access and edit files while you’re disconnected from a network. Locking files, as a result, becomes very difficult when one or more members of a workspace are offline. In Office Groove 2007, there’s a subtle yet powerful enhancement that I believe will improve the document versioning experience significantly. When you open a document from a Groove workspace and make changes, you now have the option of saving your changes atop the existing version OR saving the file as a new version. I’ve been running the beta version of Office Groove 2007 for several months, and I’ve already noticed in practice that this small feature has streamlined the process of reviewing documents among a team. And, of course, when you’re ready for a rich, structured document workflow, you can take advantage of the new SharePoint files tool.