How do I make a Groove Forms Field editable only by managers?

In response to a question on the Groove support forum, I've written up a new FAQ:

How do I make a Groove Forms Field editable only by managers?

I'll be migrating the rest of the FAQs onto that list over the next few weeks. I don't like using a weblog for this, much. I could write a custom FAQ tool for my main web site at www.hyperoceanic.com, but I don't have the time. Does anyone know of a good hosted FAQ site?

Good SharePoint Workspace review

Peter Bruzzese at Infoworld has a good review of SharePoint WorkSpace.

Bambuco 1.4.1 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of Bambuco 1.4. This release simplifies script development, offers more features, improves error checking and improves performance.

Existing users note! Version 1.4 is a free upgrade, but you need to contact us before installing it - your old license key will not work. Contact us for new licenses. There have been some changes to the functions offered within the scripting environment which means we cannot guarantee your old scripts will run unmodified. Please install the new version into a separate folder, preserving your existing production copy. Test your scripts and when you are happy they work the same, start using the new version.

New Groove Book

Frédéric Sitbon and Jean-Michel Davault have published a book about Groove - "La confiance collaborative en réseaux", or "Confidence in collaborative networks". You can find out more here: Extend human trust to your collaborative networks.

Updates coming soon!

Usually, we release major updates to our tools soon after the release of major updates of Groove. With the release of Office 14 still a long way away, we're going to go ahead and releas new versions of our tools anyway.

Over the next few weeks you'll see new releases of Bambuco, Toucan Reporter and Toucan Navigate in that order.

Spam?

We're seeing lots (hundreds) of 'undelivered email' messages coming into our email accounts today. This means that someone has marked their unsolicited commercial email (SPAM) with email addresses ending '@infopatterns.net'. This is a common spammers trick and does not mean our email system has been compromised. You can find an article about it here: Email Address Forgery.

If you receive spam messages that appear to come from Information Patterns, I'm sorry you've been targetted, but we have no control over this.

Live Mesh

Jon Udell discusses Live Mesh with Ray Ozzie. When I tried to register for the beta version, it was already full, so I've yet to see see it, however here's an interesting quote from Ray, which applies to those of us who have been running our companies on Groove and developing applications for it.

"But the DNA elements are the basic sync model, the basic interaction model. The biggest difference between Groove and Notes was that Groove embraced the concept of ad-hoc interaction much more in terms of inviting people into a shared environment. So those invitation models are essentially borrowed from Groove into Live Mesh. So if you are a Groove user, you will feel very comfortable with that model in dealing with Live Mesh".

Email server changes

We're moving our email server this weekend. If you get a 'user does not exist' message, please try again later.

The Technology of Tracking Human Disease

Attending this conference? Be sure to catch RayJordan from our partners D2i Solutions, who will be demonstrating how Toucan Navigate 2007 and Groove can be used together to track disease outbreaks, assess at-risk populations and manage an effective response.

Linking Toucan Navigate and Zoho Creator

I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.

Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.

Specifically, I wanted to:

1. Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
   
2. Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
3. Display thousands of records on a map.

In less than ten minutes I assembled this (I did have the data). The form below is used to capture data.

The ZC View is used to filter the data by Franchise or by State and to save the Filtered or all the (aprox. 20,000 records) and save them as .csv file (needed by Toucan Navigate).

Toucan Navigate is used to display all or a partial list (i.e. filtered) of the records stored and maintained in ZC.

So here it is - a map clearly showing the concentration of Fast Food Places along the I-95 corridor.

You can check the ZC app here: Fast Food Tracker

And download a trial (full feature) version of Toucan Navigate.

Bambuco Desktop gains Microsoft Certification

late last year, we submitted Bambuco for testing, and I'm pleased to report that

"Bambuco Desktop has been tested and meets the criteria for the Microsoft “Platform Test for ISV Solutions” program:  Windows Client, SQL Server 2005, Managed Code and Web Services + .NET Framework."

In plain speaking, this means Bambuco has passed tests for connecting and working with SQL Server and web services. There was no test relevant for the Groove-specific aspect, otherwise we'd have submitted it for that. The core code that makes up 90% of Bambuco is shared with our other products, which is a nice confidence booster.

"Testing was conducted independently by VeriTest, a testing service of Lionbridge Technologies."

Mark recognized for his contributions to the Groove community

Today we've found out that Mark Smith, one of the founders of Information Patterns has been awarded with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award. For more than five years Mark has devoted his talents to enhancing Groove and to helping others who are using Groove. The products that Mark has developed have been very useful to many entities around the world - in many cases for emergency response or disaster relief .
CONGRATULATIONS to Mark!

Partner news

Congratulations to Asher at our partners Tech-Pro, who has made his first sale of Toucan Navigate 2007 to a customer in India!

Also congratulations to Jean-Michel Davault at Hommes et Process and Clive Davies at D2i - both have passed the new Microsoft Office Groove 2007 certification exam. If you're looking for a partner to help with implementing Groove, then you should consider J-M and Clive to be your "go to" guys, if you're in the UK or France.

Toucan Reporter updated

I've just uploaded a new release of Toucan Reporter 2007. This release, 2.0.11  features new icons for the application and the report files well as fixes for a couple of bugs.

Extracting Groove Forms attachments with Bambuco

Working with files in Groove seems to be a theme, this month. We're just finishing off a project for a customer who has lots of forms records with lots of attachments. This is affecting forms performance, as well as being unwieldy, so we're moving the attachments out of the forms tool and info a files tool. This makes them amenable to searching with our recent free Tocuan FileFinder application.

Here's the script that extracts the files from the forms tool, written in the Boo programming language:

/*
Class: ExportAttachments
Exports the attachments from a forms tool
*/

class ExportAttachments (GrooveScript):
    def Main():
        try:
            space = Groove.GetSpace("DMS2")
            formsTool = space.GetFormsTool("Billing")
            data = formsTool.GetData("All Records", "", true)
            table = data.Tables[0]
            for row in table.Rows:
                cust = row["CustomerName"]
                purchaseOrder = row["PONum"]
                rec = GetFormsRecord(row)
                print "${cust}/${purchaseOrder}"
                for attachment in rec.Attachments:
                    attachment.SaveToFolder("C:\\temp\\${space.Name}\\${cust}\\${purchaseOrder}");
        except e:
            ReportError(e) 

I'm pretty happy with this - it expresses my needs clearly with (almost) a minimum of overheads. I particularly like the the SaveToFolder call which constructs the folder path using the variables declared earlier on. The only ugliness is getting the data with GetData, and then getting the zeroth table from Groove in two lines rather than one.

What about error checking you may ask? Well, it is included - at two levels. First, if there was any of the usual problems (space or tool not existing for example), you would see a warning message. GetSpace, for example, will post a warning message if the space does not exist. If something unusual happens, the ReportError script function will give you a detailed report.

Of course, I'm only going to take a part of the credit - the code responsible for integrating with Groove. The clarity of programming in Boo is down to Rodrigo B. de Oliveira and numerous supporting developers.

If you want to have a play with Bambuco - go right ahead and download it here.

Useful (and free) data for Toucan Navigate

Our main objective with Toucan Navigate is to help people create meaningful maps very quickly. If you're looking for readily-available datasets, try these two web sites. Both provide useful and free data that can be downloaded and displayed in Toucan Navigate. Once downloaded, with just a few mouse clicks you can start viewing them over the roads maps and satellite imagery from Virtual Earth. You can also edit these datasets to fit your specific needs.

• GPS Data Team. This website has a large selection of POI (Points of Interest) from many countries. The image below shows Wal-Mart stores in the U.S, which were downloaded from their bulk download page. You will need to choose one of the .csv formats available and add a header row (Name, Longitude, Latitude).

• ESRI. ESRI offers free map data from the Census Bureau, which are very useful. You will find water bodies, census tracks and many other GIS files compatible with Toucan Navigate. ESRI also provides a simple way to download World Baseline Data in .shp format.

Download Toucan Navigate and start mapping your data now.

Free stuff: Toucan FileFinder for Groove

Not only free, but useful too! We've created a small utility program to help you find files in Groove files tools.

Download Now

Watch the tutorial video - Many thanks to Viral Tarpara at Microsoft for the tip-off about Jing!

Toucan Navigate 3.0.3 now available

The new release of Toucan Navigate 2007 is up. This release has some significant improvements to the Virtual Earth tile renderer, making for cleaner maps. We've also tidied up the UI and fixed a lot of bugs. You can download it from here

Toucan Navigate 2007 WebCast

October 18th, we're running a webcast in association with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. We'll be talking about how Toucan Navigate 2007 integrates with Virtual Earth to make it easy to assemble maps from data in Excel spreadsheets, Groove Forms and SQL Server. We'll also be highlighting the options that using a web/desktop hybrid application offers over straight web applications.

If your work has a geographic element, and you need to work in a team with people who may be in different offices, or no office at all, or even different companies, then we believe we've got something interesting to offer.

Sign up here: Virtual Earth and Toucan Navigate for Offline Mapping & Collaboration

Bambuco Desktop 1.3 download ready

Bambuco Desktop is now available for download and to buy. This version incorporates the MapPoint address lookup engine directly and has a licensing application bundled with it. This version will run for for sixty days before requiring you to buy a full license, and each day is limited to twenty successful script runs.

You can find out more about Bambuco here, or visit the support forum here.