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.