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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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