Office Groove 2007 is a collaboration software program that teams can use to share information and work together on project activities — from simple document collaboration to custom solutions integrated with business processes. Teams using Office Groove 2007 work inside collaborative workspaces, which put all team members, tools, and information in one place. Groove workspaces keep teams up to date automatically and efficiently, and enable them to work anywhere, anytime, and with anyone, so they spend less time coordinating and more time working.

Team projects and processes span departments, offices, organizations, time zones, and cultural boundaries. In order to maintain business speed and agility, organizations must help teams overcome these boundaries so that productivity and work quality are not compromised.

Office Groove 2007 helps teams bridge boundaries by providing a contextual work environment that adapts to the ways they need to work — inside the office and out, online and offline, with internal and external team members. By creating custom solutions and connecting Groove workspaces to existing business systems, organizations can help ensure project activities naturally flow into structured business processes, quickening the overall pace of business.

By helping to increase both team and individual productivity, Office Groove 2007 helps teams complete projects on time and within budget. Because teams using Office Groove 2007 don’t need to meet or hold teleconferences as often, Groove can also help reduce travel and phone costs. Office Groove 2007 can help team members improve the quality of their work because they spend less time coordinating with each other and more time on their own contributions.

Any team of information workers that needs to collaborate on a project can derive value from Office Groove 2007. Team sizes typically range from 2 through 30 members for maximum productivity and effectiveness. Projects can range from document collaboration to custom solutions tied to existing business processes. Specific examples of projects that can be completed in a Groove workspace include:

• Developing a customer Request for Proposal (RFP).
• Managing the marketing launch of a new product.
• Collaborating on a new business proposal.
• Coordinating a logistics project.
• Managing a client audit.
• Coordinating a legal case.
• Managing the response to an emergency.

There are five core elements of Office Groove 2007:

• Workspaces. Containers created by information workers to share information and work together on team projects.
• Tools. Applications added to workspaces by team members for the purposes of sharing and working together on information, both structured (for example, forms) and unstructured (for example, files).
• Presence and Communications. Built-in presence awareness, chat and messaging.
• Alerts. Text and audible notifications that inform workers of key events and work activity.
• Launchbar. A single starting point for users to monitor all Office Groove 2007 elements including workspaces, contacts, presence, and alerts, and to execute basic functions such as creating new workspaces and communicating with or inviting users.

Office Groove 2007 includes the following tools: Files, Discussion, Groove SharePoint Files, Calendar, Meetings, Issue Tracking, Forms, Groove InfoPath Forms, Notepad, Pictures, and Sketchpad. Several workspace templates with custom tools are included and more will be made available for download in the future.

Yes. Many individual Groove tools can be customized. In addition, Forms and Groove InfoPath Forms enable team members to design custom tools that can be added to any Groove workspace for the purposes of sharing and tracking data. For very rich enterprise solutions based on Forms or Groove InfoPath Forms, some IT assistance may be required, particularly where there may be a requirement to connect to enterprise systems.

All Groove workspaces, tools, and data are stored on each team member’s computer. Office Groove 2007 keeps each team member’s copy of the workspace, tools, and data synchronized, even if no two members are online at the same time, or if members are separated by firewalls. The Groove Launchbar provides a convenient interface to view all the workspaces on your computer. Workspaces can be organized into folders and viewed in different ways to help you identify new workspace content and activity.

Office Groove 2007 handles data conflicts differently for different types of data. Generally, for more structured data types (for example, business forms), Office Groove 2007 has built-in conflict resolution; for unstructured data (for example, documents), Groove 2007 helps ensure data preservation in all cases by creating a copy when two users edit the same file concurrently.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 is a Win32 application like the rest of the 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system, requiring that each team member have Groove 2007 installed on their computer(s).

While there is no theoretical limit to the number of people that can be invited to a Groove workspace, the design center of the software is based on small teams (2–30 members).

Yes. Your Office Groove 2007 account can be shared across multiple, licensed computers in order to keep a synchronized copy of all your workspaces on each computer.

By default, all information shared in Groove workspaces is encrypted on users’ desktops and as it crosses a corporate network or the Internet. The network doesn’t have to be encrypted because the software itself does the encrypting and decrypting.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 provides several features to help mobile workers control when information in Groove workspaces is synchronized. See the Office Groove 2007 product guide for more detail.

The Groove Files tool and SharePoint Files tool enable team members to save their changes to a document as a new version, if they want. Teams wanting strict version control can publish documents from the SharePoint Files tool in Office Groove 2007 to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 document library, where version control can be implemented.

Groove workspace members are one of three roles: manager, participant, or guest. Each role has its own set of default permissions, which can be customized for the workspace as a whole and for the individual tools. By default, workspace creators are managers and others invited to workspaces are participants. Roles and permissions can be changed at any time during the life of a workspace.

Office Groove 2007 provides two mechanisms to notify team members of changes and activity: unread marks and alerts. Unread marks point out new content that has not yet been viewed by a team member. These marks are removed automatically when content is read, or can be removed manually. Alerts actively call out content changes and key events through text dialog boxes or sounds (for example, when a file is updated or when a team member enters a workspace). Alerts are customizable, and can be throttled up or down on specific workspaces and tools. This enables you, not the software, to decide what work is most important at any given time.

It depends on which option the user chooses. Managers can delete a workspace from all team members’ computers. Participants or guests of a workspace may only delete a workspace from their own computer(s).

While the vast majority of features of Groove Virtual Office version 3.1 are available in Office Groove 2007, some features and tools were removed, either because they were not heavily used or because their quality was in need of improvement. Some of these features and tools may return in a future version of Groove or be made available by download at a later date.

Find pricing and licensing information on the 2007 Microsoft Office system pricing page.

Yes. Find packaging information on the 2007 Microsoft Office packaging page.

Office Groove 2007 enables workers to share any Microsoft Office document within a workspace using the Groove Files tool, SharePoint Files tool, or other tools that support file attachments such as the Discussion tool, Meetings tool, and Forms tool.

No. Office Groove 2007 supports documents created in the 2007 Microsoft Office release and prior releases, as well as documents created with other software applications.

Office Groove 2007 features a new tool called SharePoint Files that provides document library integration with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. The Groove SharePoint Files tool provides a smooth way for teams to collaborate on documents in a Groove workspace, publish them to a Windows SharePoint Services team site for sharing with a larger group, and store them on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for retrieval by the organization at large.

One of the core design goals of Office Groove 2007 is to ship the product with the highest degree of quality and user satisfaction of any Groove release. It was determined that the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint — in terms of usability, stability, performance, and extensibility — needed improvement. Many of the capabilities of the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint, however, have been replaced and improved with the SharePoint Files tool in Office Groove 2007.

Office Groove 2007 features a new tool called Groove InfoPath Forms that project teams can use to import InfoPath forms solutions into a Groove workspace for the purpose of collecting and aggregating data. The resulting InfoPath XML documents can be exported from the Groove workspace or integrated directly with an enterprise system.

Office Groove 2007 features new integration with the 2007 and 2005 versions of Office Communicator. Directly from a Groove workspace or the Groove Launchbar, you’ll be able to view your Office Communicator contacts and engage those contacts in real time using a Communicator phone call or an instant message. Office Groove 2007 presence awareness in workspaces and the Groove Launchbar matches the look and feel of the Office Communicator gumdrop icons.

One of the core design goals of Office Groove 2007 is to ship the product with the highest degree of quality and user satisfaction of any Groove release. It was determined that integration with Outlook and Word in Groove Virtual Office version 3.1 — in terms of usability, stability, performance, and extensibility — needed improvement. However, integrating Office Groove 2007 with other Microsoft Office system programs is a key priority in the Groove 2007 product road map. Some or all of the removed features may return in future releases of Office Groove with enhanced functionality, usability, and performance.

See the system requirements for Office Groove 2007.

If you are running Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1, you can upgrade to Office Groove 2007. If you are running Groove version 2.0, 2.1, or 2.5, you must first upgrade to Groove Virtual Office version 3.1 before you can upgrade to Office Groove 2007. You should make a backup copy of your account before upgrading to Office Groove 2007.

Workspaces created with the Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint will not synchronize with SharePoint sites after upgrading to Office Groove 2007. Tools developed by third parties may not work as expected in Office Groove 2007; contact the third party for more information about compatibility with Office Groove 2007. For the other core Groove tools, you won’t notice any changes to tools or data in your existing Groove workspaces after upgrading to Office Groove 2007. However, new workspaces will only support the Office Groove 2007 tool palette — you will not be able to add previous tools that are no longer available in Office Groove 2007.

No. Anyone you invite to a workspace created with Office Groove 2007 must upgrade in order to accept the invitation. However, Office Groove 2007 users can accept invitations to workspaces created by users of Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1.

Yes. Office Groove 2007 users and Groove Virtual Office version 3.0 or 3.1 users will be able to exchange contact v-cards, view each others presence, and send and receive messages.

See the system requirements for Office Groove 2007.

The Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 currently supports the following foreign language versions of Office Groove 2007 Client and Office Groove 2007 Manager: