Today, I am inspired to share some love (getting into the Groove-y mood ;-)) about the latest addition to the Microsoft Office system.

As the baby of the system, Groove seems to be taking a while to find its place in the well established Office family of programs.

While the big boys (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) go from strength to strength with great new features that can make a real difference to the way you work, the younger members have truly found their feet and are showing real benefits to users and organisations. Meanwhile some people are unsure of where Groove fits in to this family picture.

The reason I find myself pondering this today, is that some healthy debate has been sparked among some of my colleagues about just how good Groove is, and where exactly does it fit into the Office story.

For Gill and I, Groove has become an essential part of how we manage projects and workloads, we use what Gill calls “baby”-Groove, basically we just create shared folders in Groove, these sit on both our desktops and synchronise automatically when we log on to Groove (regardless of whether the other person is online at the time). This has two major benefits for our working; firstly, we don’t need to keep asking each other for the latest version of a document (this is really handy when more than one person uses a document frequently, like we do with our budgeting sheet), and secondly, it means that we don’t have to email each other huge attachments, we just drop them into the Groove folder from our Desktops and the other person gets an alert from Groove immediately or as soon as they log in to Groove.

So, my top 4 reasons for loving Groove at the moment are:

  1. Sharing information – having the most up to date information all in one place to access whenever you need it to make quick decisions or share with others. 
  2. Offline access – it doesn’t matter if you are not connected to a network, all Groove folders and items can be accessed offline and as soon as you next log on to Groove, your changes will be made and everyone else will get receive any updates you have made.
  3. Working together – working in any kind of team can have its challenges, working in a dispersed and mobile team can be doubly demanding. Groove means that everyone can access and update shared information when they need to and all other team members can get those updates when it is convenient for them.
  4. It just works! – Setting up “workspaces” is really easy, just choose to create a workspace, follow the wizard and there you have it. Inviting the team members is as easy as sending them an IM or email. Then working in the workspace is just exactly the same as using any document folder that you have on your desktop.

 

And this is all just “baby”- Groove, you can find out more about the full product and what you can do at the Preview Site, and Gill and I will certainly be talking more about how Groove can help at work in the future.

But, really the best way to realise all these great benefits is to get the beta and try it out for yourself. Obviously, you need a team working on Groove to really see how it works, so why not spread the Groove word to a few of your colleagues and find out for yourself just how big a difference it can make (if your colleagues are not on the beta, they can access the previous version of Groove on trial to run alongside their existing system).

Happy Groove-ing