COOUG seldom arranges for product demonstrations, however we could not resist for an "over the top" product like this.  From Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes comes Groove (www.groove.net). Featuring peer-to-peer concepts popularized by internet music-swapping programs like Napster and KaZaA, Groove aims directly at the business environment with decentralized collaboration far more effective than E-Mail.  There are so many possible uses for Groove technology that the Q&A discussion at this meeting went on and on.

The live, three screen presentation demonstrated how Groove's technologies can be used to build new collaborative applications and extend existing applications to work securely across organizations.

Groove's secure peer-to-peer distributed architecture resides on top of Microsoft's COM and .NET platforms.  Developers can use Jscript, C/C++ or VB to develop in COM, and can use C#, VB, or any other CLR compliant language for .NET.

Groove provides all the features necessary for doing business:

• End-user autonomy
• Firewall transparency and traversal
• Centralized IT control
• Back-end integration
• Security and protection of intellectual property
• Offline availability for mobile employees

According to Ozzie, decentralized collaboration will be the standard way users conduct business relationships, to the point that they only use e-mail as a place to receive communications from people they do not know.

We gave away five book door prizes courtesy Addison Wesley.
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