The Weekly Groove

Error -- “Unable to register with Relay Server”

by Gregg Johnston

Scenario

You have just set up your Groove server environment, and it looks good. You have your Groove Manager server running and a connection to SQL server. Groove Relay is all fired up and has been added to the Groove domain. Users have been added too, and you are ready to activate. However, after a successful activation, your users suddenly get this message popping up:

“Unable to register with Relay Server”

What happened?

Groove is returning this error message because it is reaching a Relay server which has the option Authenticate Groove users enabled, but the account has not been registered on the Relay. This option is commonly called pre-authentication because when it is set, the Management Server needs to register users with the Relay Server before users can use that Relay Server. The procedure goes like this:

1. User added to Management Server
2. User registered with Relay by Manager
3. User activates account
4. User's account connects to Relay Server
5. Relay Server validates the account’s registration

In Connection Manager on a user's computer, click Advanced Network Settings, click Network Diagnostics, click to expand Home Relay Devices, and then click to expand the device URL. You will see this line:

Status: Disconnected,Created Connect,Received Secured ConnectResponse,Connected,Sent ConnectAuthenticate,Sent Attach,Received AttachResponse,Created AttachAuthenticate,Sent AttachAuthenticate,Sent Register

If pre-authentication was properly implemented, you would see one more entry: Received RegisterResponse. Because we see Sent Register but not Received RegisterResponse, we know that pre-authentication is enabled, but the user's account is not registered with the Relay. Because of this, the Relay will not provide services to the account.

There are two different issues that cause this problem.

Communications issues

The Manager may be unable to contact the Relay correctly. Try opening a telnet connection from Manager to Relay over port 8009. If that fails, but you can ping the Relay from the Manager, the port may be blocked on your Relay server. In Windows Server 2008, all ports are blocked by default in Windows Firewall, so problems here are especially likely. If the issue is not port access, look for other communications blocks between the two servers. Once you can telnet to from the Manager to port 8009 on the Relay, restart both servers. Take a look at the Audit log on Manager Server. Do you see user adds in the log? If so, success! If not, time to look for another solution.

Auditing services problem

The other common cause of this problem is a faulty installation of Manager. Even if you go through each step of the installation carefully, there is one old issue that can trip you up. In the unpatched Office Groove Server Manager release, you could not run Manager and Audit services on the same computer. If you added Auditing Services during installation, but did not slipstream Office Server Service Pack 1 (SP) or 2 into the Manager Server updates folder prior to installing Manager, you will not be able to register users with the Relay Server. (You will also be unable to synchronize a directory integration point to share user information with Active Directory.) To test for this issue, run the following query on your SQL server:

select EnableDirectorySynchronization, EnableRelayServerSynchronization from gmsservers

If you installed without SP2 updates, this query will return 0. Unfortunately, resolving this problem requires uninstalling and reinstalling the Manager. This is time-consuming, but will only become more of a chore if you use the server first and then return to this solution.

Is there an alternative? Sort of. As a workaround, you can disable the option Authenticate Groove users on the Relay. (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261658.aspx for instructions.) We don't usually recommend this approach, as it has two major problems:

• Security and Performance risk: If you turn off pre-authentication, and someone gets a hold of your ServerID.xml file from the Relay Server, they could, hypothetically, use that file on their Manager Server and then use your Relay Server as their Relay. They would not have any access to any data on your Relay, or your Manager for that matter. But they could launch a Denial-of-Service attack by deluging the Relay with data.
• Functionality loss: You will be unable to synchronize users with Active Directory.

For a more complete resolution, uninstall and reinstall Management server. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• After you uninstall Groove Management Server, you also need to remove the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Groove\Audit Server
• You will need to remove all GMS and Audit databases from SQL
• You must slipstream Office Server Service Pack 2 into the GMS updates folder before reinstalling. For directions, go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178995.aspx#DeployInitialUpdViaUpdatesFolder

Now you are ready to reinstall GMS. However, take a moment to think about Auditing services. Do you really want Auditing services running on the same computer as your production Manager server? More often than not, the answer to that question is “no”. The Groove Audit Server was meant to run on a separate server and can take up quite a lot of system resources. So even though you can (with slipstreamed SP2) run Audit Services with Manager, it does not mean you should. For more details, see the documentation at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262178.aspx.

When you have made your decision, reinstall the servers and recreate your domain members.

“So I ran grooveclean, but that didn’t fix the problem…”

by Gregg Johnston

“So I ran grooveclean, but that didn’t fix the problem…”

Software doesn't always work the way we want it to work.  When things go wrong, we often fall back on what have learned about the software in order to diagnose the problem and try to fix it.  Sometimes we just do things because they are “something to do” as opposed to something that can actually fix the problem.  Such is the case with the applet in Groove called grooveclean.

Many times on the forums, we read about a user having a problem, and one of the things they will state is “I ran grooveclean, but that didn’t fix the problem...”  Most of the time, running grooveclean will not fix the problem.  Sometimes, running grooveclean might fix the problem.  It all depends on where the problem is located, what the problem is, and what has been done thus far to fix it.

So what exactly is grooveclean?  Take a look at this knowledgbase article:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907854

What grooveclean does is remove all the buffer files that are set to transmit and to receive. It also removes diagnostic information.

That’s it.

It is not a panacea for all Groove problems.  In fact, running grooveclean has the potential to cause data loss.  Say you have an Instant Message that is in the “Waiting to send” stage.  Shutting down Groove and then running grooveclean will delete that message unsent.  So when is a useful time to run grooveclean? Let's say that you added a large amount of data to a Groove space and then immediately deleted that data before anyone received it. As a result of this, Groove has a large outgoing buffer with a delete command that is following the data.  Running grooveclean will clear out that buffer. Grooveclean will also help if there is corruption in a buffer. Anything having to do with communications being stuck and not progressing might be a good time for grooveclean.  However, running grooveclean can also make data backlogs worse, because Groove will attempt to retransmit data that has not synchronized correctly. So if you added data and then deleted it from the workspace after a member received it, running grooveclean will not help. To keep everyone in the same state, Groove will retransmit the data added and the delete operation until everyone in the workspace has received them, and if you clear the buffer, it will need to regenerate that buffer and start the transmission again from the beginning. Bottom line:  use grooveclean with caution and only use it if you have attempted other troubleshooting steps.

It is best practice to start troubleshooting communications issues from other angles before running grooveclean.  Determine if this is a problem with Groove, or a problem with your network.  Focus on what is currently happening with your communications by going to Communications Manager (Options > Communications Manager).  Is there one space with a lot of activity?  Best to let that activity complete and then reevaluate.  Is there no space activity?  That could indicate a communications problem, and grooveclean probably will not fix it.

One thing grooveclean will never fix is an error message on start up or some sort of system error message.  Another thing grooveclean will never fix is the small amount of data that is in your communications tray.  See this technote for that:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916384 - yes, grooveclean is a part of the process, but it is not the process.

Also, a quick word about grooveclean with the –all option: running grooveclean –all will remove all Groove account and workspace data from the computer.  So it is important to consider everything that is associated with that action before running it.  Do you have your account backed up?  Are you willing to start over with a new account if you do not have it backed up?  Are you willing to lose your Instant Message history?  Are there other Groove accounts on the computer that you do not want to lose?  Remember, even if you have your account saved to a file, you do not have all of your workspaces and workspace data saved. Keeping these things in mind, know that once grooveclean –all runs, there is no return. 

(For information on backing up account and workspace data, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907230.)

So grooveclean is a handy tool if you are stuck in a communications jam.  But it is not the cure-all for all problems in Groove.  It is meant to be used in a limited way for a limited set of circumstances.

(Today's article is from contributer Gregg Johnston.)

Synchronizing files in Groove – to GFS or not to GFS

...that is the question

Many users have started to use Groove because of the handy way it takes a folder in your directory and shares that folder as a Groove space – synchronizing files between workspace members and computers. Many users have also gotten themselves into trouble using Groove File Sharing (GFS) workspaces by turning their My Pictures folder and My Music folder into GFS workspaces, breaking the hard limits Groove sets for workspace size and number of files number and causing all kinds of performance and application problems. When is the best time to use a GFS workspace? What are some alternatives to GFS? What should you do when you start seeing oddities in GFS workspaces?

GFS workspaces are quite handy. By clicking New Workspace and selecting Groove File Sharing workspace, you can turn your directory into a Groove workspace that sits outside of the application. You can then invite colleagues to the workspace and they will share your data. You can also have chats within these workspaces, and see the online status of members of the workspace. Other workspace members can choose where to put their local copy of the workspace once they have received an invitation. They can decide to place it on their desktop, sync with another folder, or choose a location that better suites them. (I personally place the workspaces under My Documents.)

These workspaces are also not encrypted. They are, security-wise, treated as any other Windows folder. Therefore, if something catastrophic happens to Groove, the folders can still be accessed through normal means. If something catastrophic happens to the computer, the folders can potentially be accessed through a backup of some sort (obviously this depends on the backup applications involved), or retrieved from another workspace member.

The down side to this is that the GFS workspaces can also be accessed like any other folder in your directory. Whether it be an intrusion via hack or virus, GFS workspaces are exposed like any other Windows folder– with the potential for the effects of such exposure being synchronized to all workspace members. However, data in GFS workspaces is transferred in an encrypted state. When a change is made to a file, that change is sent to the Groove application, is serialized for transport, sent out encrypted via Groove to the Relay, transferred from Relay to the receiving Groove client encrypted, decrypted by receiving Groove client, and sent to appropriate file / folder.

So while GFS workspaces are handy, they do have some risk involved. An alternative to GFS is a Standard Groove Workspace with a Files tool. In these workspaces, a Groove Files tool handles all documents and other files. It has the look and feel of a Windows folder as well as the capability to drag and drop files to, from, and within the workspace. The data is encrypted, so it is resistant to outside attack from hacker (unless they have your Groove password) or viral corruption. Data does not have to be encrypted and unencrypted to synchronize, so there are also performance advantages. Rules on the number of files, the size of the workspace, and types of files still apply, as they do in GFS. However, there is no limit to the number of Standard workspaces you can have in a Groove account, unlike GFS, where the hard limit is 64. The down side is that all the data is encrypted in the Groove application. If a catastrophic event happens, the Groove account is unavailable, and there is no other workspace member or computer that has the data, then the data is irretrievable.

Two other alternatives to GFS workspaces are Live Mesh– currently in Beta – and Office Live Spaces.

So if you decide to use GFS workspaces, what should you do if things start to go wrong? The first thing you should do is to look at the number of files in the workspace. While there is a hard limit of 5000 files per GFS workspace, the more files you have in the workspace, the more synchronization that needs to happen. Related to that is the size of the workspace. 2 GB is the hard limit. However, once you get to 1 GB, you should start thinking about removing files or splitting the workspace into smaller workspaces. Most problems with GFS workspaces are rectified by eliminating data or starting over with new – smaller -- workspaces. Also you will want to consider other items such as system resources (disk space, memory) and bandwidth (high speed or dial-up?) when troubleshooting GFS issues.

GFS workspaces are handy, and when used appropriately, can be useful. However you will want to consider carefully what the future of a GFS workspace looks like. If the workspace has the potential for large growth, consider if a GFS workspace is the right method for sharing this data. Think about the alternatives and what benefits they might have over a GFS workspace. If you are doing a smaller collaboration and need a way to share a limited amount of files, then the GFS workspace might just be the tool to use!

(Today's article is from guest contributer Gregg Johnston. For more information on GFS issues, check articles with the GFS tag.)

Upcoming changes for Groove 3.1

I expect many of you have been hearing the buzz about Microsoft Office 2010. I'll be talking more about the features and changes in that product as we get closer to the release. However, for those of you still using Groove Virtual Office 3.1 or the Groove 3.1 servers, the 2010 release has other implications, as it marks the end of most assisted support for Groove Networks 3.1 products. Since you will not be able to upgrade directly from Groove Virtual Office 3.1 to Office SharePoint Workspace 2010 (the Groove successor product), you may want to start planning for this release now. We've posted an article that provides guidance on the support and maintenance changes for the Groove 3.1 products and the upgrade and migration paths that will be available. For details, please take a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974478.

Groove name change

By now, I expect that most of you have seen an announcement that that in Office 2010, Groove will become Sharepoint Workspace. Jim McCoy has more information about the reasoning behind that name change here: http://blogs.msdn.com/groove_development_team/archive/2009/05/13/makeover-for-groove-sharepoint-workspace-2010.aspx

If you're anything like me, this probably makes you wonder what will happen to the rest of Groove. Fear not! Office SharePoint Workspace 2010 will not be a single-function client. Obviously, we do see SharePoint integration as a major feature of the product and as a way to add value in the office of the future. While we are emphasizing and enhancing that integration, we haven’t stripped out everything else -– you will still be able to use SharePoint Workspace 2010 without SharePoint.

Obviously, details about Office 2010 are still confidential, so that's really all I can say at this time.

Summary of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 changes for Groove

Hi all!

You may have noticed that it's been pretty quiet here lately. That's because we've been busy preparing for the recent releases of Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 and Microsoft Office servers 2007 SP2.

These service packs fix the following problems:

Server installation and configuration:

• Groove Manager Server 2007 cannot use SQL Server 2008 as a database. (See KB 968770)
• Groove 2007 Manager cannot create an AD integration server connection in Directory Integration Properties dialog when using a Single Label Domain
• Other Groove Manager installation issues

Activation:

• Groove client auto-activation fails if the Active Directory domain name and the NetBIOS domain do not match.
• Groove client auto-activation fails if the user logon name and the domain name combined contain fewer than seven characters. You receive the following error message: "Groove could not find account information on the local machine."
• Account configuration fails when the Groove client uses an IPv6 address.
• If a new Groove domain client is provisioned with an invalid certificate, the client displays an error message, but the Relay does not log the failed registration attempt.

Client operations:

• Groove 2007 may crash because of a resource limitation after you create or join lots of file sharing workspaces. The exact number of file sharing workspaces varies by system, but is usually between 50 and 55. This problem was discussed in this post Note that as part of this fix, there is now a hard limit of 64 File Sharing workspaces. (See KB 968769).
• The Groove Forms tool incorrectly interprets spaces for digit grouping in currency values for some locales.

Server operations:

• On Windows Server 2008, when Windows Firewall uses complex rules, Groove Relay may incorrectly detect that ports are blocked and fail to start.
• In some circumstances, large instant messages that became corrupt cannot be recovered by Groove Relay, and the instant message is never delivered.
• In some circumstances, the Groove Relay silently stops accepting SSTP connections and SSL connections. This intermittently causes remote users to be unable to connect to the Groove Relay server. This failure is not logged. When you shut down the relay to attempt to recover from this situation, the relay eventually hangs.
• Various problems with sending debugging information to Microsoft.

Also, be aware of this change: KB 968768 -- SP2 adds .cnt and .hpj to blocked file formats in Groove 2007 and Groove 2007 Manager.

Groove 3.1 Licensing maintenance issues

Do you run Groove Virtual Office 3.1, or use the old 3.1 Groove Hosted Services? At this point, we believe most people who were using Groove Virtual Office 3.1 -- the last version of the Groove desktop application produced by Groove Networks -- have transitioned to Microsoft Office Groove 2007. However, if you are still using these legacy products, you may be interested in the services provided by Acquisition Support at http://acquisitionsupport.custhelp.com. This site provides licensing support for 'products recently acquired by Microsoft'. (That's for some rather large values of 'recently', apparently -- four years ago, in this case.)

Visit http://acquisitionsupport.custhelp.com for these three Groove 3.1 items:

• To exercise your downgrade rights from Office Groove 20007 to Groove Virtual Office 3.1
• To request a replacement activation code/license key for your existing Groove Virtual Office 3.1 account
• To add or change a domain administrator for your Groove Hosted Services 3.1 domain

Note that regular Groove Support cannot help you with these issues, and acquisition support cannot help you with any other issues.

Discuss: Relative file transfer speeds of File Sharing and Standard workspaces

In a comment here, Camineet poses a question about relative file transfer speeds of File Sharing and Standard workspaces. Since this varies by environment, I wanted to open it up for others to contribute. Do you have data to share?

Groove hangs at launch

We have seen an increase in cases of Groove hanging at launch, either before displaying the login window, or soon after displaying the Launchbar. There are several conditions that cause this, and thus several things that fix it. If you are having this problem, determine which ones may apply to your situation:

• If Groove fails to launch immediately after installation, see the MSO.DLL section, and if you are using Windows XP, the MSFTEDIT.DLL section.
• If you were previously using Groove, but it now fails to launch, see the Temporary data section, and if you are using Windows XP, the MSFTEDIT.DLL section.

MSO.DLL

All office applications use MSO.DLL, and some updates for versions of Office prior to Office 2007 put it in locations that are no longer used. If you have or had a previous version of Office or any Office standalone applications (for example, Word XP) installed on the computer, Groove may be finding an incorrect version of MSO.DLL. To resolve this problem, follow these steps:

1. Using Advanced Search, including hidden and system files, search your primary drive (and any other drives that may contain Office files) for the file MSO.DLL.
2. Examine the Search results. The MSO.DLL file for Office 2007 applications should be in the following location:
   


• C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE12

It can also legitimately be in one or both of the following locations:

• C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\OFFICE11
• C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Office10


3. For each MSO.DLL file that exists in a folder OTHER than the three listed above, rename that copy of MSO.dll to MSO-old.dll
4. Restart your computer and then restart Groove

MSFTEDIT.DLL (Window XP only)

A product installation or update may have left you with a corrupted, unregistered, or incorrect version of MSFTEDIT.dll, a shared Office file. As a test, attempt to launch Wordpad. If that also fails to launch, you have a problem with MSFTEDIT.dll.

To resolve this, install Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3).

Temporary data (usually only after Groove has been in use)

In many cases, this problem is caused by a corruption in a fragment of transient data. When Groove attempts to process the data at startup, it hangs. Try the following two procedures to resolve corruption problems.

• Run the grooveclean command (without command options!) to delete inbound and outbound queues, and other transient data. Deleted workspaces changes will be regenerated, but you may lose messages that were finished but not sent or received but not processed before Groove shut down. For full details and usage, see "How to use GrooveClean.exe to delete Groove data" at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907854


• Delete Groove folders in your user Temporary folder -- To make sure you target the right files, use this procedure:
  


1. Using the From Start/Run, enter %TEMP% and click OK.
2. In the open Temp directory, delete any folders named GrvTmp (If there are no GrvTmp directories, this is not the problem.)

Rearranging a Groove-synchronized Windows folder

 

When you use a folder in your daily work, you naturally find yourselves moving things around. For example, shortly after I started blogging, I realized that my work documents folder had become cluttered with  half-written article ideas, so I changed the names of these files to start with "do-" and moved them into my blog and solution subfolders, both of which had previously been only for finished articles.

We all make these sorts of changes, right? However, since work documents is the root of a Groove file sharing workspace, I had to keep in mind how the changes might affect performance. Here are a few things to be aware of when you start reorganizing a GFS folder.

Factors affecting workspace performance

Consider what happens when you rename a file. Workspace members who are logged into Groove need to process the new file name, but unless you have a huge number of files, this isn't a big deal. However, if a member is not logged in at the time of this operation, their Groove installation will only see the results of the change -- an apparent file deletion and a new file. In this case, the entire file is resent (or, if it exceeds automatic download limits, it must be fetched again).

If you rename a subfolder, the same conditions apply, but now if a member is offline when you perform the move they must re-fetch everything in that folder.

But what if you are not running Groove when you make these changes? After all, you can use a Groove-synchronized folder when Groove isn't active. The same problems apply. Since Groove has no information about operating system events that occurred when it was not an active process, each renaming operation becomes deleting a file followed by adding a file, and those changes must be sent to every workspace member.

In some rare cases, Groove can miss a renaming anyway. This usually happens if there is a lot of disk activity going on. If Groove doesn't get the file system events close enough together, it may not succeed in matching them and detecting that an existing file has been renamed.

Moving a file is similar, if you move the file within a directory. However, if you have a file several folders deep and move it to the top level, or to a parallel folder with a high divergence point, Groove has to make more changes to the workspace record. If you move a large volume of data this way, Groove may not be able to send all the changes effectively. In this case, the entire workspace will be resent to all members.

In my case, these changes all had to be sent to my other computer, but because I am the only member of the workspace, I didn't need to worry about offline members. I made sure both computers were active in Groove, and that I wasn't running anything disk intensive on either one, and everything went smoothly.

Recommendations

Plan:

• Decide which files are moving where
• Avoid renaming large directories
• Avoid any single operation that will affect more than 200 files
• Avoid rearranging files in deeply nested folder
• Choose a time to make the change. Ideally, it would be when network usage is low, but most members are online. Obviously, these two states won't usually coincide, so take your environment into account.
• It is better to make small changes frequently than overly large changes less often. For example, if you move files for closed projects once a month and have had problems, consider doing it once a week.

Communicate:

• Let workspace members know that they may see significant data transfer in Groove

• Ask workspace members to stay online in Groove until changes are complete

Execute:

• Ensure that you are logged into Groove before making the changes
• Move files in batches, if you need to move more than 200 files. For example, move 100 files, wait for the changes to disseminate to end users, and then move the next batch
• If you need to move files to or from a deeply nested folder, move only a few files at a time

With these guidelines, you should be able to rearrange your GFS folders without synchronization problems.

Welcoming another Groove blog...

Jim McCoy revived the Groove Development team blog a few months ago. We cross-linked our blogs at the time, but since custom links are so far down the sidebar, I'm not sure they get noticed. Check out his blog for tips and tidbits on what you can do with Groove.

 

Problems with "Discard Groove messages from unknown contacts"

Under the Options tab of Groove Preferences, there is an innocuous looking option, Discard Groove messages from unknown contacts. While this option is useful in some situations, it is important to understand the problems that may result from using it. All of these are well documented in the Help, but are not obvious from the UI.

Obviously, when this option is enabled, messages from unknown contacts -- that is, Groove accounts that are neither in your known contacts list nor verified by your Groove domain -- will be discarded. This is done silently. Because accepting an invitation relies on an exchange of confirmation messages, you will not be able to accept an invitation from an unknown contact either -- not even if the invitation is saved to a file, and made available to you via email, a web page, or a file share. Similarly, unknown contacts will not be able to accept invitations from you. Because the messages are discarded silently, you will have no indication of what failed.

The Groove Known Contacts  or Known Groove Users list is assembled from a number of sources. (For details, see "A Groove contact may still appear in the Known Groove Users list after you delete the contact" at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917195.) One of these is workspaces. For that reason, if you have your account on multiple computers, and have workspaces that only exist on one of the computers, a contact that is known on one computer may be unknown on the others, leading to apparently inconsistent behavior.

Because of these complications, this option is recommended only for short-term use. If you are in a situation where you continue to receive too many unwanted messages from unknown users, see the Recommendations section of the Help topic "Restricting messages from unknown contacts" for guidance on moving to a new identity. If you had intended this option as a security enhancement, see the Communication Policies options under the Security tab for Groove Preferences instead.  

When Groove Administrator email doesn't reach the user

 Here's a scenario for anyone who administers a Groove domain from Groove Enterprise Services or Groove Hosted Services (i.e., from a Microsoft-hosted server). Let's say that one of your users lost their account and needs their account backup. No problem -- the server has a current one. You use the Services Manager UI to email the account backup file to the user, and you don't get an error or bounce message, but the user never receives the email. What could be wrong?

Most likely, the message has been filtered out by an email server between the Groove server and the recipient. Here's the problem: email from the hosted Manager has four required fields: Sent To, From, Subject, and Message. "From" is intended for you to enter your administrative address so that you can receive bounce messages and replies. However, many modern email systems silently discard messages in which the "From" address does not match the source in the first "Received" header, because fake from addresses are frequently used in spam and in malicious messages.

There are two ways to work around this:

• (Preferred) Use the Manager option to download the backup, rather than emailing it. You can either move it to a network location that the user can access and provide the user with a pointer to it, or you can move it to a network location that you can access, and then email it from your own account.
• Have the administrator of the mail server white-list the host that will send the email. Inconveniently, I cannot provide host names, because the sending systems occasionally change without notice, as part of load-balancing on the Microsoft servers. To find the sending host for your case, send mail from the Manager to yourself at a known open destination (for example, if your corporate email performs this check, create a hotmail account and send mail to yourself there), and then check the headers to see where the message originated.

When reading headers, the earliest "Received" is last in the list. For example, if the mail message originates at Host1 and goes through Host2, Host3, and Host4 to reach your SMTP server at Host 5, the "Received" portion of the header will look something like this:

Received: from  Host4 <ip address> by Host5 <ip address> with <SMTP Server and id>; <day>, <date> <time>

Received: from  Host3 <ip address> by Host4 <ip address> with <SMTP Server and id>; <day>, <date> <time>

Received: from  Host2 <ip address> by Host3 <ip address> with <SMTP Server and id>; <day>, <date> <time>

Received: from  Host1 <ip address> by Host2 <ip address> with <SMTP Server and id>; <day>, <date> <time>

In this case, you would want the mail administrator to whitelist Host1, so that all mail from Host1 is allowed.

A summary of Groove workspace synchronization

Since Groove is all about synchronization, it should come as no surprise that a lot of our support issues fall into that category. Here's a brief summary of factors to consider when data is not synchronizing from one workspace endpoint to another, or when changes do not occur the way you expect them to.  In order to keep this from being a monster of a post, I'm only going to talk about Standard workspaces. For information on how Groove File Sharing workspaces differ, see my post of September 16, http://blogs.technet.com/weeklygroove/archive/2008/09/16/comparing-groove-standard-workspaces-and-groove-file-sharing-workspaces.aspx.

First, here are a couple of terms you should understand:

Workspace endpoint: A local copy of a groove workspace. Since each Groove account can be used on up to five computers, a workspace may have more endpoints than members.  For example, I run my Groove account on a desktop at work, and on my laptop. Some of my workspaces have only those two endpoints and no other members, but most have other members, some of whom also use multiple computers.

Groove Relay: A server that can accept data on behalf of a Groove user, and which then either forwards that data on immediately or keeps it for the user to fetch at next contact, depending on connection states and types. Data on the server is transient and encrypted.

 

When changes are sent

Groove isn't sensitive to opening the file and not changing it. However, if you an automated process or software application that is making a minor change to the file (for example, a version control application that adds versioning information when the file is accessed), that is still a change.

If you edit a file in the Files tool, Groove will try to send just the changes to the file.

How changes are sent

When you make a change to a workspace, Groove queues the data for each workspace endpoint except for your account on other computers. It sends the data out to other online members (either directly or via relays) and to the relays of other offline members. Updates for your own account on other computers are handled as part of account synchronization and do not go through the relay. In a workspace with multiple members, you will can receive these changes from other members, but if you have Groove on two computers and a workspace with no other members, you will need to come online on both computers to synchronize the workspace between them.

For details on when Groove uses a Relay Server, see http://blogs.technet.com/weeklygroove/archive/2008/09/23/more-details-on-groove-servers-mostly-relay.aspx

Change conflicts

Groove processes changes in the order that it receives them, regardless of time stamps. Because of this, a file can be restored by someone who has modified it or moved it coming on line after others have processed a deletion. If multiple files are being deleted and then sent to everyone again, that will consume network and local resources.

If two people change the same version of a file, the first change is saved back into the primary file. If an online user tries to save other changes later, Groove asks the user whether it should save the changes in a conflict file. If an offline user saves other changes to a Groove file, and then when Groove comes online, the file has been changed by another member, Groove creates a conflict copy without prompting to preserve the offline changes.

Synchronization performance

There are a number of things that can affect performance. If you've seen a substantial decrease, you may have a situation in which there is a backlog of unsynchronized data. Try having all workspace members stay logged into Groove for 24 hours and see if that helps. Do not delete and re-add data, as both operations cause data transfer.

If a workspace member does not receive changes for over three weeks, and the workspace is large enough that this may present a resource problem, Groove will prompt any workspace manager who makes a change to suspend the inactive member. The member will not be suspended unless the manager agrees. However, if a workspace endpoint does not receive changes under the same conditions, and the member on that endpoint is receiving workspace changes on other computers, the endpoint may be silently suspended. For details, see “Information about synchronization alerts in Groove” at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;913614.

 

I hope this helps! Let me know if there are aspects of this that you would like clarified.

Adding a Sharepoint Files tool to a Groove workspace

Someone on the Groove newsgroup recently noted that the instructions for “Setting up a SharePoint Document Library connection” in the Groove Help only apply to Windows XP. After confirming this was true, I checked the Groove 2007 Help and How-to Home page at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX102270281033.aspx, the most current documentation for the Groove 2007 desktop application. The instructions there do not refer specifically to Windows XP features, but also didn’t work for me when I followed them exactly on Windows Vista. (That should be fixed soon.) There are also possible shortcuts that vary by Windows version and are not documented.

If you are adding a new SharePoint Files tool to a Groove workspace, here’s what I recommend:

1. In the new tool, click Setup to open the Select a document library or folder dialog box.

2. Select a SharePoint site by following these steps:

   1. In Windows Vista, click to open My SharePoint Sites; in Windows XP, click to open My Network Places

   2. If the SharePoint site that contains the document library you want to synchronize in Groove is displayed, double-click to open it. If the SharePoint site is not displayed, enter the URL for the SharePoint site in the Address field at the bottom of the window, and then press the Enter key.

   Note: The URL should start with http:// or https:// and end with the site name – for example, http://sharepoint.adatum.com/sites/oursite. If you copy and paste the SharePoint site URL from a Web browser, be sure to truncate the URL so that it contains only the sections required for referencing the site.

3. If prompted, enter your credential information, and click OK. A list of document libraries and subwebs displays

4. Select the document library that you want to synchronize and then click the Select button. (If you want to synchronize a lower-level folder in the library, you can click down to it before clicking Select.)

Note that the notification that the tool is synchronizing comes up in a separate window, and if you click on another window at the wrong moment, it may end up obscured. Don’t immediately assume that the operation has failed when the tool display doesn’t change. Wait a few seconds, and check your taskbar to see if a status window has appeared. Depending on the size of the library, the initial synchronization can take a while, and your SharePoint Files tool will continue to display the setup screen until synchronization is complete.

In Windows XP, you can avoid manually entering the URL by adding the site to My Network Places. When I first started looking at this, I wondered if you could similarly add sites to My SharePoint Sites, or if you could use configured Network Locations. Neither is a solution. The My SharePoint Sites list is generated once a day by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and lists sites in which the user is a Member. If you have permissions to a site through Active Directory, or if you are only part of the Owners group, it will not show up on the list. If you have not set a default My Site, qualifying sites may not show up in the list. Frequently the only way for a Groove user on Windows Vista to link the SharePoint Files tool to a site is the URL method.