Migrating from Groove 3.1 to MS Office Groove 2007

At InfoPatterns, we have been looking closely at all the issues related to upgrading from Groove 3.1 to MS Office Groove 2007. Why? In our case it is relevant to our business, both in terms of our operations as well as our product offerings. As a virtual company with people in four different cities on two continents, we use Groove daily to collaborate on business, technical and administrative issues. Our business is also about building companion tools to Groove that enhance the collaboration experience, be it mapping, reporting or integration with other systems.

Here's a couple of headline items you should be aware in terms of compatibility.

1. Grove 3.1 accounts cannot be invited to workspaces created with Groove 2007. If your users not only create workspaces but are also often invited to workspaces created by others outside your organization (i.e. our case) they will only be able to accept those invitations if they upgrade.
   
2. Groove 2007 users can be invited to 3.1 workspaces BUT ...
   
3. 
   
   
   
   1. You need to set a configuration option. See this FAQ item at GrooveForms.com, our site for Groove Forms developers.
      
   2. Third party tools like our Toucan Navigate (version 2.1) or Team Direction's Project for Groove 3.1 which installed into the Groove user interface in Groove 3.1 cannot be installed nor will they show up in Groove 2007. This is the error message you would get if you tried to install an in-one. This situation doesn't apply to those tools developed by Groove which have been deprecated in the 2007 version (i.e. Task Tracker, Contact Manager, Document Review and other minor ones) - a rather sad thing to see for those of us who can remember when Steve Wilkinson and then John Giudice at Groove Networks were trying to create a third party community. Luckily in both our case as well as that of Team Direction, we've come up with more interesting tools as a result of Microsoft's decision. In our case, we've made the decision that our tools will work the same way regardless of which version of Groove you're using.
      

Here are our recommendations before you upgrade to 2007.

1. Review how Groove is used in your organization. If Groove has been used as it comes out-of-the box, there isn't much risk in migrating to 2007.
   
2. If you have invested time in building custom solutions based on Groove Forms and third-party tools such as ours, spend some time checking that those forms work the way you intended them to. Rember, you wo'nt get any benefit from using forms tools built for Groove 3.1 in Groove 2007. Consult your supplier for third party applications. We have been spending time with our clients discussing our new product offerings and status based on these changes and they have proven to be both beneficial and encouraging to us and them.
   
3. Stay in touch and check out the Groove forums available from MS as well as the partner community.
   

We'll be running both Groove 3.1 and Groove 2007, so that we continue to fully support our users, old and new. What about you -are you staying with Groove 3.1, or are you migrating to Grove 2007? Send us your comments. We will gladly try to help you with any migration issues you may have.