[Sigia-l] using groove on design projects

[Gent, Andrew]

>>Does anyone have any experience using Groove as a collaborative tool
on IA/UX/interaction design projects? (http://www.groove.net/)


We have been using Groove in Hewlett-Packard, specifically within the
Services organization, for two years starting back in what was Compaq
Professional Services. It is well-suited to our needs because of the
nature of our work: discrete system integration projects for clients
done by consultants who are often on the road or otherwise outside our
intranet. The work is not IA/UX work specifically, but I have used it
for that myself.

Groove is a peer-to-peer client application. That means it takes up
system resources on your machine, which is particularly noticable on
older machines. More importantly, Groove is a collaboration environment.
Unless you are actively collaborating, it will not appear to do anything
but chew up your computer. In other words, if you are not actively using
it, you don't start it all the time, so your spaces don't synchronize
and you can't see any changes or receive any Ims and when you *do* start
it it spends most of its time trying to synchronize all the changes you
didn't receive while you were "offline". 

We saw this in our original pilot when after 6 months we did a user
survey and the results were split pretty much 50/50: those who actively
used it liked it, those who didn't start Groove at least once every
other day didn't like it.

It is clearly most useful for *active* projects.

Personally, I like Groove a lot and use it constantly. No, it doesn't
replace email. (It doesn't even replace Messenger or AIM, although I
receive IMs to and from them all.) What it replaces is undistinguished
and unprotected shared drives and the piles and piles of attachments in
email -- where no one knows which is the latest version. (This is what I
believe Bram Dijkshoorn was referring to as "document exchange".) It
also replaces and augments web server-based team spaces, which cannot
provide the security, accessibility, or offline access Groove can for
our roving team members.

I'd also like to make one final comment about something that was said in
another post:

[Faith Peterson] The engineers to a person tried and it and didn't like
it, and so never logged in... as I remember it that was a problem
because it confused people when they would log in and and some resources
would be available, or not, depending on who was connected. 

In Groove, everyone has a copy of the space -- assuming they have
synchronized. So this is an example of the chicken and egg I spoke of
earlier: You don't start Groove, you see no changes. If you see no
changes, you won't start Groove. On the other hand, if you keep groove
running, you will see changes. If you see changes/activity, you'll tend
to keep Groove running. There is a certain leap of faith that is needed
to get started with collaboration technology such as this. Also, the
peer-to-peer model is just very hard for some people to understand. I to
this day have people asking me what "server" is storing their Groove
spaces. 

I would be happy to discuss this further offlist if you wish.

Andrew Gent
Lead Knowledge Architect
HP Services
1.603.884.7475