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."

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.

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!

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.

GPSTray updated

We're releasing updates and full versions of all our software this month, and first off the block is GPSTray. This application connects to your GPS and lets you use a Bambuco script to send your GPS location to Groove, SQL Server or to anywhere else.

If you've bought Toucan Navigate, contact us and we'll send you a copy of the update.

Introducing Toucan Navigate 2007

This month we will start delivering the new version of Toucan Navigate (2007) to our clients and also introducing a free version. Our focus this time around has been on delivering an application that combines what is most attractive about internet mapping applications (i.e. on-demand detailed maps and satellite images, address look-ups and routes) with what's attractive about desktop applications (i.e. privacy, offline work, rich user experience).

Here's a video of the new Toucan Navigate.

Searching for Groove information?

Since Microsoft was 'acquired' by Groove Networks, a few thing have happened:

1. Forums-based support has moved to the main Microsoft community-based forums,
   
2. Lots of people within Microsoft have started blogging about Groove.
   
3. The Groove-specific documentation has been scattered all over Microsoft's web sites.

This has made it a lot harder to find all the relevant content that might help make your Groove-life easier. To redress the balance, I've spent some time this evening creating a Groove-specific search engine using the Groove Custom Search Engine. You can find it here.

Backing Up Groove Spaces

Microsoft have recently published a very useful guide to your options for backing up your Groove spaces. You can find it here. It focusses on your options for backing up entire spaces which is useful for a security measure, but somewhat limited - you cannot do anything with a Groove space archive other than restore it.

A nice thing about the article is that it mentions some third-party offerings that make Groove backups easier - including Bambuco. The article doesn't really explain the advantages or disadvantages of the different approaches. With Bambuco you can do the same as the other suggestions - backup a space, but you can also do something much more useful, which is select what parts of the space are backed up. As an example of the latter approach, I've posted a script in the Bambuco Developer Center which lets you copy files out of a Groove Files tool based on the file extension.

There are a bunch of good reasons for wanting to do this:

• Quick restore of files accidentally deleted within Groove
  
• Your files etc. are available for further processing such as searching,
  storage in corporate repositories or conversion to other formats.
  
• You can run Bambuco scripts as a part of a larger scheduled job.
  
• You could even copy selected files or other content from one space into another.

Launching New Products at NCGIS 2007

Today we are introducing our next generation of geocollaboration products at the North Carolina GIS Conference with Microsoft's Virtual Earth team. We have two new products, GeoBlogIT and Toucan Navigate 2007, which incorporate valuable lessons learned from working with our clients, the team at Groove (now part of Microsoft) and the Strong Angel excercises.

We'll be talking about both of these offerings in the coming weeks.

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.

Whats the story with Toucan Reporter 2007?

Since releasing Bambuco in November, I've been working on getting the next version of Toucan Reporter ready. We're getting pretty close I think. We've had a major rethink about how people use Toucan Reporter. Initially, I thought teams would have one or two 'reporting experts' on them who would design and (crucially) generate reports to be use by others both inside the team and outside of it. The design reflected that use.

Turns out, that isn't what people really do, or not all of them anyway. There are two camps of users - report designers and people who want to see the reports right now without needing anyone else. To accommodate these two groups, Toucan Reporter 2007 has two modes of working - Designer mode and 'Just gimme the report preview' mode where the designer is hidden. Of course, you can switch between these two modes dynamically.

The other big change is that the new version is a proper multi-document application. There's a proper menu with File|Open, and all reports share the same parent window and menu. We've also taken out some of the more obscure report settings, favoring ease of use over customizability.

There's some other new stuff coming - better rendering to text documents, much nicer PDF output, full-screen previews and a new report wizard which makes it a lot easier to create multi-table reports.

We are going to be a more generous with the free version. It will work 100% the same as the paid-for version except that it will only print if you've less than fifty records in your Groove Forms tool. You'll get all the same access to the wizard, all the same export formats and all the same report features while you're getting used to Toucan Reporter, and I hope you'll be able to make the decision to put it into production use much more easily as a result.

Right now, the plan is to go with a public beta in the second week of January, which will close at the end of the month. At that point, there will be a price increase to $100. Anyone who buys during the beta period pay the old price of $70. Existing customers will of course get the new version for free.

Toucan Navigate 3 - a sneak preview?

While we've been adding some new features to the next version of Toucan Navigate, the GIS world hasn't been standing still. The explosion of interest in GIS, engendered by WorldWind and Google Earth hasn't gone unnoticed, neither here nor at Microsoft.

While Toucan Navigate 2007 will maintain its high-speed two dimensional view of the world for most things, we're thinking of incorporating Microsofts new 'SpaceLand' 3D mapping engine for those that need it.

Here's a screenshot. It also gives you an idea where we're going with Toucan Navigate 2007. We've got some other surprises planned, so stay tuned!

Introducing Bambuco

We've been involved in a few larger Groove implementations now and one common theme has been how important it is to be able to integrate Groove with other systems. Sometimes this is just a one-off import from a database, but mostly it is making Groove Spaces work as a part of a larger, ongoing business process. For example:

• Importing customer and contract information from a corporate database into a forms tool that a field sales teams uses to guide their customers through a contract renewal process,
  
• Building new spaces when a natural disaster strikes
  
• Copying data out of Groove for searching and indexing.

After writing a few very job-specific tools for jobs like the above, we decided to take it one step further and build a tool that takes our understanding of the Groove platform and make it available to anyone who needs it, Bambuco combines our understanding of Groove, Microsofts .NET runtime and the Boo scripting language to create a simple, consistent and well documented approach to integrating Groove with other systems.

Here's an example of a Bambuco script.

class FilesToolDemo (GrooveScript):

def Main():

try:

space = Groove.GetSpace("Bambuco Samples")

filesTool = space.GetFilesTool("Files")

ListFolderContents (filesTool.Root, 0)

except e:

print "problem: ${e.Message}"

def ListFolderContents (folder, depth as int):

depth++;

// \t is the tab character. When you multiply a string by a number you end up

// with the string duplicated that many times. We use this to increase the

// depth of the printed tree of folders and files.

tabs = "\t" * depth

print "${tabs}[${folder.Name}]"

for file in folder.Files:

print "${tabs}${file.Name}"

for subFolder in folder.Folders:

ListFolderContents(subFolder, depth)

This script lists all the files in a given files tool.While the programming langage specifics might not be familiar to you, we've had a positive reception from people used to working with Excel or Access macros.

1. The first two lines define the script name and the main procedure for the script.
   
2. After that we get a Groove Space and get a files tool from it.
   
3. Then we jump to another procedure called ListFolderContents which follows the Main procedure
   
4. ListFolderContents prints out a message and then lists all the files in the folder.
   
5. After that it lists all the contents of the folders within this folder.

Easy :-)

Clearly this example isn't very userful - you're very unlikely to have a space called "Bambuco Samples" after all, but there's a great deal more power available and preliminary documentation in the Bambuco Developer Center. Let us know if you want a demo!

Toucan Reporter Activation Server problems?

We've been making some changes to our web site and to a new host, and our original hosting provider have also been making some changes to the internet addresses assigned to particualr machines. Make a long story short, you may not be able to access the license activation server for Toucan Reporter immediately after you receive your license keys from our e-commerce server. If you get an error message "site unreachable" or similar, do not despair - you can still activate your copy of Toucan Reporter (1.0 and 1.5), by following the steps below:

Open a web browser and go to http://216.128.15.73/ActivateLicense.aspx?Productcode=TR-PRO
A page will appear - the title bar will say "Activate license".
Enter the details required - name, email and license code, which you'll need to copy from the original email, and press the "Email me my activation key" button.
Check your email - you'll get a message from the activation system with a very short activation code.
Run TR and press the "Activate License" option. Enter your email, license key (the long one) and activation code (the short one), and press OK.
This is pretty much all that the automatic process did for you anyhow.

Toucan Navigate and Bambuco licenses are unaffected.

Connecting your GPS to Groove

We've developed a task-tray application to connect your GPS to Groove. It improves on the connection in Toucan Navigate 2.1 in a number of ways:

• Talks direct to Groove Forms rather than the Toucan Navigate app. This means it can work even when the Groove UI is closed.
  
• Transparently connects and re-connects to USB/Bluetooth GPS Units.
  
• Uses our 'Bambuco' scripting technology to make it easy to create flexible GPS apps.

It was used to good effect in the Strong Angel 3 exercises last week where we created a script to additionally generate SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) data that was uploaded to a central server.

Existing Toucan Navigate customers can get a version now - contact Mark or Gabe.

Ten Long Term Lessons from Strong Angel 3

Here it is - ten long-term lessons learned during one of the most memorable experiences of my professional career. Strong Angel 3 is the second demonstration for us, but the first participating onsite.

1. Lead by example. As stated by the high ranking official from the Afghanistan government participating in the exercise, moral leadership is irreplaceable. Dr. Eric Rasmussen, with his amazing human qualities, accomplishments and real world experience in disasters worldwide was our leader this past week. He has earned the utmost admiration and respect not only from all the participants but from many people around the globe.
   
2. Listen to those who know. Once the Incident Command Post was established, Carla Boyce, (Information and Plans Chief at Florida Dept of Emergency Management), acted as Deputy Incident Commander and conducted daily operations and briefings. Carla received an outstanding ovation from the executive committee and all the participants for her accomplishments in this role at SA3. Her domain expertise was indispensable toward getting the job done and her requirements were translated into deliverables. In summary, subject-matter expertise continues to drive requirements.
   
3. Collaborate. The challenge of quickly assembling useful artifacts (otherwise known as STWs) to support any operation can only be accomplished by working together with others who complement one’s knowledge. Collaboration between teams who usually compete fiercely in the marketplace produced amazing results in very short timeframes.
   
4. Stop, Drop and Roll. We were guests to San Diego’s Fire Rescue Department, yet none of us seemed to remember that simple lesson we learned from fire fighters as children. Instinctively, everyone turned on their computer immediately and acted as we usually do under normal situations. Disasters are anything but normal and we quickly learned that it would take some time and plenty of effort from the communications experts to restore connectivity. We all had to stop (trying to connect to the internet), drop (our laptops) and roll out of our designated areas until communications were restored. This forced us to spend time discussing concepts that were later put to good use.
   
5. Leave something behind. Dr. Eric reiterated this to all at the daily briefings – “leave something behind” for the San Diego Fire Dept. This surely applies to everyday life and many circumstances.
   
6. Debrief, debrief, debrief. A cardinal rule for field teams during disasters, this means, let your superior know what you’ve done, call home to let others know you’re OK and in general, share what you’ve learned with others.
   
7. Think outside the box. Some boxes include our profession, our country, our language and our beliefs. Much was discussed about how our behavior can have a negative effect on populations we are trying to help. Much effort is required in order to understand the true needs of others.
   
8. Value and maintain relationships. The SA community has created significant bonds between many of its participants. I was very fortunate to spend some time with my friends Sanjana and Rob, to get reacquainted with many others with whom we’ve worked with and develop new ones - very rewarding.
   
9. Get involved. Many of the participants are amazing people who continue to actively engage in activities that make a difference in other people’s lives, in addition to their daily professional and personal responsibilities. Much to learn from many of the folks there.
   
10. Take a moment to thank others. A big thank you Dr. Rasmussen and all the participants and observers of Strong Angel 3.

GrooveForms.com now live

Many of the questions listed on the Groove support forums related to a common set of issues. I've created a small web site at http://www.grooveforms.com to hold answers to the most common questions. If you have a question about Groove Forms (or anything else Groove related), please ask - mark.smith@infopatterns.net