[Sigia-l] using groove on design projects

[Bram Dijkshoorn]

Karl fast wrote:

> I'm specifically interested in hearing about experiences of people
> who have used Groove on projects where:
> 
>   - the team was widely distributed and rarely met face-to-face (if
>     ever)
> 
>   - the team was small
> 
>   - groove was the main collaborative tool for exchanging and
>     building the major deliverable components
>   

Karl, I have recently been using Groove in a 3 person design team over a period of 5 months. We were quite happy with the tool as far as document exchange was concerned: we were working on the same documents from time to time, and could easily see which of them had been tampered with by the others. In that sense, I would recommend it. We had problems with the following:

= Importing/exporting data from and to Outlook: Groove has US date notation (today is 05-04-03) and our Outlook uses European (04-05-03) - as a result, an appointment for today would be exported to 5 April on out Outlook calendar. That was inconvenient.
= Performance overall was pretty bad. If you want to work with Groove effectively, you need to have it up all the time. My Dell Latitude laptop suffered severely (or, actually, I did) if I wanted to work with my other usual tools at the same time (Visio, Word, Excel, Outlook, Explorer). We have occasionally tried to collaborate on a sketch or so using Sketchpad, but that was for fun rather, more than seriously trying to get somewhere (due to performance).

I liked the Talk option, which we used once in a while, but we preferred the telephone.
If you have any particular questions about the tool, don't hesitate to conatct me directly.

Cheers,
Bram

bram.dijkshoorn at informaat.nl
Informaat, Baarn, The Netherlands 
T +31 35 543 1222
M +31 6 515 48379
www.informaat.nl