Web Services Support All in the Groove 2.5

Collaboration software specialist Groove Networks is set
to roll out Groove Workspace 2.5, a new version that
features tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook
and SharePoint and supports
SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, the key protocols for Web
Services.

The Beverly, Mass.-based firm, which raked in a $51
million investment
from Microsoft last October, said the marriage of the
workplace collaboration software with Outlook would
let enterprise clients move multi-person conversations
from e-mail to the Groove interface in new and shared
workspaces.

For the first time, Groove users would be able to
integrate Outlook contacts with Groove Workspace
contacts, allowing access to Outlook contacts from
within Groove Workspace. With Groove 2.5, Outlook
calendar entries can be sent to Groove Workspace
project calendars and users would also be able to
publish calendar entries from both the Groove calendar
and meetings tools to Outlook
calendars.

Groove senior product manager Donna Carvalho told
internetnews.com the option to publish calendar
entries was also fitted with the ability to
synchronize the entries with the Outlook calendar.

Groove 2.5, which comes with a $50 per user price
hike for the professional edition, also touts a new
toolset for Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Services
(STS). The toolset provides a team Web site software
that would support online and offline use, and work
securely across company firewalls, Carvalho said.

She said Groove Workspace v2.5 would also feature
file-sharing and bandwidth updates and an enhanced
file-sharing tool that includes Microsoft’s Visio
viewer
for previewing Visio diagrams. It has also been
fitted with a digital ink-enabled chat tool that
supports Microsoft’s Tablet PC platform.

The company, which was launched
by Lotus Notes pioneer Ray Ozzie in October 2000, also
rolled out Groove Web Services, a
standards-based integration framework that puts the
collaboration software at the fingertips of a range of
new customers, devices and applications.

In an interview with internetnews.com, Groove Web Services product manager Matt Pope said the
platform would support the usual SOAP ,
WSDL and UDDI APIs in
addition to XML, which is already featured in previous
Groove releases.

Groove Web Services would provide a way for
distributing, accessing and
processing information stored in Groove Workspace by
using the Web services protocol, he explained. It
would provide users with access to Groove
Workspace from any standards-compliant application or
device.

It also features local access to Groove Web
Services that lets developers create software that
talk to Groove with other applications running on the
same device. For example, Pope explained, a developer
might use the Groove Web Services API to integrate
Groove online presence and instant messaging into an
application.

The said SOAP interfaces would be provided in
Groove 2.5 for account, contacts, members and
awareness services, as well as for popular end user
tools, like shared discussion, files and calendar.

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