Office Groove 2007

What is Groove?

Groove 2007 is a collaboration software program 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 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 — even people outside their organization — so they spend less time coordinating and more time working.

How does Groove work?

Groove includes both a client application and server components. Learn about the Groove architecture by watching these videos or reading this technical whitepaper. You can find out even more about the Groove client from the product guide and review the Groove Server 2007 product guide for more details.

How Is Groove Deployed?
The server components of Groove 2007 can be deployed onsite at your organization or are available as a hosted service from Microsoft.

Try Groove 2007

Get Groove 2007 as part of your MSDN subscription, or visit the MSDN Evaluation Center for a free trial of Office Enterprise 2007 (which includes Groove 2007). The MSDN subscription license terms allow for installation for testing and development purposes. The Enterprise MSDN kit includes Groove Server 2007.

Blogs

Groove Advisor
Learn more about Groove, get the latest news from the Groove product team, and find links to other resources.

Hugh Pyle
Hugh is a Program Manager on the Groove team and focuses on Groove extensibility and the Groove Forms API and Web Services API.

The Weekly Groove
Information from the Groove Support Team.

Visual How To's

Customizing the Groove 2007 Forms Tool to Create Simple Status Reports
Create a custom tool where team contributors can cite the weekly status of their project deliverables.

Software Development Kit

Groove 2007 SDK
Download developer documentation on using the Groove Web Services API and Forms API.

Technical Articles

Best Practices: Archiving Workspaces Using Groove Data Bridge
Review the recommended best practices for configuring, monitoring, troubleshooting, and programming against the Groove Data Bridge 2007 (GDB).
Best Practices: Integrating Data Using Groove Data Bridge
Learn how to use the Groove Data Bridge as a data integration point between Groove 2007 workspaces and line of business applications.
Best Practices: Working with Forms Tools Scripts in Groove 2007
Review the recommended best practices for developing forms-based applications in Microsoft Office Groove 2007.
Collaborate: Help Teams Work Together with Web Services and Groove 2007 (MSDN Magazine)
Groove provides the rich client for collaborative data gathering and secure synchronization of data between team members. This article illustrates how a custom .NET Framework application can be used to connect the data to a corporate database.
Optimizing Groove Forms Tool Performance
Learn to use the Groove 2007 Forms Tool and the InfoPath 2007 Forms Tool and understand how your design decisions affect performance. Both are customizable and programmable general-purpose tools with similar performance tradeoffs.
Preparing InfoPath Templates to Use in Groove 2007
Use a Microsoft InfoPath 2007 sample template as the basis for a Groove InfoPath Forms tool, adding your own customization, or without design or layout changes.
Using Web Services Helpers to Access Data in Groove 2007
Reduce code complexity when accessing Microsoft Office Groove 2007 data by creating or using custom wrappers around the Microsoft Office Groove 2007 Web Services API.
Using Web Services Helpers to Access Events in Groove 2007
Simplify coding when developing Groove Web services applications that handle events.

Downloads

Developer Map for the 2007 Microsoft Office System
Check out the developer map for all the Office system products which includes a brief summary of developer technologies available for building custom Groove solutions.
Web Helpers for Groove 2007
Groove Web Helpers are a C# .NET assembly that provides an abstraction layer for Groove 2007 and Groove 3.1 Web Services. The abstraction layer provides an easy to use API, with an object and eventing model, so that custom applications that interface with Groove can be built more quickly.
Groove Web Helpers were developed to eliminate the need to write 80-90% of the same code over and over again when directly consuming the .wsdl files provided in the Groove SDK. Recent updates include enhanced event handling, support for the Groove InfoPath Forms Tool and Groove SharePoint Files Tool, and now the ability to use the Web Helpers with 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003, and Vista.

Office Groove 2007 Developer Portal