[Guest Blogger] - As Mike Myers would say "Groovy Baby"

Graham Jones (Vancouver, BC, IT Pro and UserGroup Lead)

Office Groove 2007

My friend Graham Jones pinged me earlier today to talk about how he and the VANTUG executive committee are using Groove 2007 as a collaboration platform in order to plan for an upcoming event. I use Groove myself with partners, friends and with the national "Canadian IT Pro UserGroup leaders" group I engage with. 

If you haven't tried it out yet and you have to connect with "unconnected" individuals for the purpose of sharing and collaborating on a project - nothing beats it.

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VANTUG is holding its Community Launch event on February 20th and we will be covering all four areas of interest:

  • Windows Vista
  • Exchange 2007
  • Office 2007 (mainly SharePoint 2007)
  • Framework 3.0

The team comprises of myself (the guy with the whip – no we don’t have clandestine meetings and dress in black leather) and 4 people each doing one of the topics. We are spread over a fairly large geographic area in Greater Vancouver. So the challenge was how to bring this all together both from a consistency of presentation standpoint and to tie pieces together where it made sense. We have been supplied with a huge amount of great material by the CLT people in Redmond; in fact a rather overwhelming amount of material :) (:. Since it was clear that regular face-to-face meetings were going to be a major challenge I suggested that we use Groove as our collaboration workspace. One of the others had used it before and was very enthused.

The upshot is that we are now in full swing using Discussion, Chat and Files to try and get everyone on the same page. I think that it is safe to say that the 3 that hadn’t used it before are now equally hooked and are glad that the Community Launch gave them an opportunity to “test drive” Groove.

Cheers

Graham Jones
President, VANTUG