Jiri’s Notepad

I have been using Groove for some two weeks now, the last one when travelling around without any permanent network connection and so I feel I can have some comments.

We used Groove mainly for its messaging, discussions and filesharing capabilities. More sophisticated tools (like meetings or projects) were restricted in the evaluation version and so we didn’t use them. We tried launching powerpoint presentation over the connection adn it was OK. Using built-in voice chat felt like hearing voice streamed over 28.8 kbps modem and in the future I would probably be inclined rather to use phone to chat over the documents in a shared space.

The fact that Groove can work in pure peer-to-peer mode was a great help since we were offline for more than half of the week only ocasionally connecting over dial-up. We were using small hub and ethernet cables when offline which was inexpensive but little clumsy. Using something like wi-fi or bluetooth would be probably easier and also undeniably cool (i.e. working like that on train). Using infrared to setup P2P connection on top of which Groove could run is possible in theory, but in practice infeasible because it works only on short distance.

The only glitch I experienced was that after renaming my identity I was degraded from being manager to participant role prevented me from deleting things. Fortunately this happened only shortly after we created our shared space so it wasn’t such an issue to discard it and create a new one.

Despute the issues, overall it worked remarkably well and helped us in the way I had expected.