Sharepoint Online & Groove

This week I ‘ave been mostly…using Groove.

Groove has been the one bit of MS technology that I’ve never taken a look at before and I’ve always thought it was a bit pointless…but not anymore! Now I think it’s awesome and perhaps the best product they’ve got, alongside Sharepoint. I’ve had it installed for years as part of Office ’07 but I have literally never opened it up until this week. The thing that prompted me was this post here over on Dutch Technet about using it with Sharepoint Online and as MS Online is my big thing-I figured it was worth investigating.

Groove is essentially a collaboration tool that let’s you create “workspaces” and then invite co-workers and/or external people to join; you can then share and edit files, chat via IM, track issues, play chess (!) and more-all with a minimum amount of effort. As an example, I’ve created a MS Online/BPOS workspace and have invited the various people involved @ MS-this way we can share info, ask questions and keep updated much easier than simply via email.

The Technet post revealed to me that you can link Groove to Sharepoint and thus share files from your site collections without the hassle/cost of giving users direct access to Sharepoint…even better, you can do this with Sharepoint Online too!

Internet Explorer 8.1 is an April Fool

Internet Explorer 8.1 AKA “Eagle Eyes” has been all over the net this afternoon, sitting on the Front Page of Digg and Techmeme…but it’s an April Fool’s joke-at least according to Mary Jo.

It did perhaps sound too good…faster Javascript and better Acid 3 testing and, best of all, support for Firefox extensions. Would MS really have released IE8 without these features if they were so close at hand? Apparently not…

I thought it was against the rules to do the pranks early so I think that means the joke is on you Jacob Gube (technically) Good skills though

MS Roundtable now Polycom CX5000

Well, the title pretty much says it all-the MS Roundtable, their innovative 360 degree panoramic video conferencing unit-is now made and sold by Polycom as the CX5000.

I’ve known about this for a few weeks and it’s hard to tell if this is going to make things better or worse to be honest. Bechtle have done very well with the Roundtable but the biggest problem for customers, has been the lead time…originally 10-12 weeks & now a more palatable 4-6 weeks. My hope is that due to it being more “their thing”, Polycom will step up the product of the units and perhaps even have them in the warehouses of distributors-allowing us to offer next day delivery (that’d be great!).

The down side is that CNET are quoting an RRP price of $4300 and the previous RRP was, I believe, $3000. If both these figures are correct-that’s one HECK of a price increase-over 33% in fact!

Funky looking and useful