Groove Virtual Office
Do You Work in a Virtual Office?
No matter the size of the organization, people are seeking ways to better cope with the changing nature of work. Your 'office' is where you keep your most important files, and where you meet and work with others on important tasks. And these days, this 'virtual office' is increasingly wherever you and your wireless laptop happen to be: in a conference room, your home, an airplane, a hotel, or onsite with your customer.
The impact of virtual office work is amplified when it begins to affect not only personal productivity, but also team and organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
People work with other people all the time. Such work may not always seem like team work. For most people, it is just work. The ability to connect with colleagues -- to share ideas, to conduct analysis, to get quick answers to questions, to make decisions, to track and manage deliverables – is just the way work gets done. But as the virtual office becomes the norm, it has become more and more difficult for loosely defined teams to connect in a rich context that lends itself to real business getting accomplished.
Increasingly, work is conducted outside of the office itself. Participants in a business activity are working from home more frequently, including after hours or during flextime. Increased reliance on strategic partnerships and outsourcing relationships has brought with it the challenge of keeping multiple companies in synch. It has also placed a premium on spending time outside of the office and onsite with those partners, not to mention with customers. Even those workers who spend most of their time at their desk with a high-speed connection to the internal network and to the Internet find themselves frequently working directly with others who are occasionally disconnected, bandwidth constrained, and/or not part of the same company.
Virtual office work is putting stress on the seams of the business technology infrastructure. Consider the following common symptoms of daily work today:
· Month-long set up times to provide a shared work area for teams of people, including external participants.
· No integral support for users who are occasionally disconnected from any network.
· Arduous VPN setup and usage procedures for internal workers who use it as a last resort.
· “Creative” coping mechanisms by end users seeking to minimize bandwidth issues when connecting from a dial-up, or “communications challenged” environment.
· Stubbornness on the part of employees who continue to rely almost completely on email despite IT’s conscientious implementation of more functional -- and more secure – alternatives.
Such personal inconveniences accumulate to give rise to team inefficiencies and organization ineffectiveness. Below are three routine business activities that stumble and struggle in a virtual office setting.
Geographically separated teams. A producer of compressed gas is working in the fast growing Chinese market. It frequently responds to Requests for Proposal, and gathers a team with members from an outsourcing partner in Shanghai and internal employees in the U.S. and elsewhere in China. Turnaround time on RFPs is three weeks. Because the set-up of a new work area takes too much time for the team members, they typically use a pre-existing document repository. That repository becomes cluttered, and it quickly becomes difficult to post and/or find the appropriate documents in the right place. When the team regularly meets (at 7:00 a.m. in China and 7:00 p.m. in the U.S.), the first half hour is typically spent making sure everyone is on the same page with the most current versions of supporting documents. As a remedial measure, team members often send the documents as email attachments during the meeting.
The result is ineffective meetings, significant wasted time, and, often times, a lower quality proposal than would otherwise have been possible. In a business where market share in an emerging market is a critical success factor, technologies designed for a 1990s style infrastructure and a more parochial business climate are a drag on organizational performance.
Multi-organizational. Pharmaceutical companies have dramatically redesigned their business model to rely on strategic partnerships with small biotech companies, research consortia and medical device manufacturers. When a business relationship is struck with one of these partners, the first weeks of the partnership is critical to build personal relationships, define expectations and standard operating procedures, and establish trust. Yet, for many pharmaceutical companies, their infrastructures have always been internally focused, designed for a business model in which partnerships were not such a critical business driver. Those infrastructures have been tweaked with mirrored servers in the DMZ and with VPN technology rolled out to partners. However, such solutions have sometimes been complicated, expensive, and – more important – slow to set up.
The result: the partnership gets off to a slow start as the technology infrastructure works to catch up with the speed of the business.
At the customer site. Many workers – consultants, business development professionals, sales and support teams -- are used to the fact that doing business often means sitting in a conference room at the customer site, sometimes for days at a time. While the benefits of such co-location are obvious, the effectiveness of those individuals while away from the corporate network is hampered. Sometimes the customer allows the visitor to get on the internal network.
Yet, when such connectivity cannot be assumed, the changing nature of work has an immediate impact on the effectiveness of those workers. What’s more, in some of these cases, the offsite workers need a connection to each other as they sit in the same room! An infrastructure that assumed most of its users to be deskbound and in the office fails to be flexible enough to accommodate a shifting operational or business model.
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In theory, these problems should not occur. If bandwidth were truly ubiquitous and plentiful, if configuration settings were always right, and if people just behaved in a manner that took into account the systems designed to support them, virtual office work would be seamless. People would be able to work together as if they were all in the same place, no matter where (or when) they are.
In the absence of such ideal conditions, there is Groove Virtual Office.
Groove Virtual Office
Groove Virtual Office v3.0 is software that allows teams of people to work together over a network as if they were in the same physical location. When people work together in Groove workspaces:
· Everyone is always working with the same set of information.
· They are aware of each other through electronic peripheral vision, so that online water cooler encounters occur frequently and naturally.
· They work from wherever they are – at the office, at home, at the airport or hotel, or even disconnected from the network.
· Activity and content find their way to people, instead of the other way around.
· They spend less time sending the same files to each other over and over, and more time concentrating on the work at hand.
· No one spends time thinking about or configuring firewalls, encryption or network access.
Whatever the team of people is working on – from simple file sharing to formal and informal projects to well-defined business processes – Groove Virtual Office allows them to work together as if they were in the same room.
The Building Blocks of Groove Virtual Office
This section describes the essential underpinnings of Groove, and how they allow work to get done easily without consideration for time, place or organizational affiliation.
At its core, Groove is a set of five capabilities.
• Synchronization. Unlike a master-slave system in which there is a single instance of an application and its associated content, the Groove application and its contents reside in their entirety on multiple endpoints. Groove synchronization ensures that each endpoint has a complete and consistent copy.
• Offline usage. A direct result of that synchronization is the ability to use any Groove application while disconnected from the network. Any changes made to the application by any of the participants are propagated across the network. When the offline user returns to the network, all changes are forwarded and synchronized, even if other users have gone offline in the meantime.
• Firewall traversal. Groove includes intelligent routing capabilities that allow traffic to transparently cross any firewall or network address translator boundaries. Groove software detects the presence of a firewall and determines the most efficient ports and protocols through which it can pass.
• Always-on encryption. Groove software automatically generates a public/private key pair for encryption when the software is installed on the personal computer. Groove software intelligently distributes encryption keys among users in a way that is completely transparent, ensuring that all activity enjoys military-grade encryption without any intervention (or even knowledge of encryption) required on the part of end users or IT staff.
• Bandwidth optimization. Groove includes local intelligence that examines the changes made to a file or other object, and packages just those changes for transport across the network. This service makes the most of limited bandwidth by assuring the same file does not make needless repeated round trips across the network when only small changes (or no changes) have been made to it.
Together, Groove core capabilities allow work to seamlessly and effortlessly cross organizational boundaries, go offline, take place in low bandwidth environments, and to do so without compromising the security of the information.
On top of these capabilities (all of which are invisible to the user), Groove Virtual Office includes a set of utilities that are immediately apparent and practical to the user.
· Presence. Groove Virtual Office keeps track of contacts and lets users know who is online, and if any of them are currently active in a workspace shared with them.
· Alerts. Groove automatically alerts users to new activity that is important to them. This provides the user with visibility into what’s going on among all his current work. According to each person’s preference, a Groove Virtual Office user is made fully aware of when a file is added or updated to a workspace, when a colleague has come on line or has entered into a particular workspace, when a real-time conversation is taking place or when a conversation has already taken place while the user was offline or away from his desk.
· Personal communication. Groove Virtual Office provides a variety of communication media, including instant messages, real-time and persistent chat, and Voice over IP.
These capabilities uniquely enable Groove Virtual Office to be something far more than a convenient way to share files and information. Instead, they transform a simple information container into a vibrant, active workspace where people share, discuss, debate, decide and act. In other words – it becomes the place where work actually gets done.
Using Groove Virtual Office Workspaces
The capabilities described above are a foundation. Any Groove application inherits those capabilities, immediately bringing to it the reach and flexibility of a virtual office. This section describes the functionality of Groove workspaces, and what they are used for.
Workspaces: Work in Context
Groove Virtual Office is designed to bring the assets of the physical office – content, people, projects, processes – into the virtual world, making it easy and intuitive for team members to work together as if they were in the same room. Groove Virtual Office includes unique features that bring the virtual office experience to life.
Launchbar
The starting point for most Groove users is the Launchbar, which affords easy management of and access to all Groove workspaces and contacts, as well as a simple way to monitor the up-to-the-second status of workspaces and contacts.
The Launchbar provides the user with a variety of useful ways to view workspaces and contacts, including alphabetically, grouped by folders, grouped by organization. One option many users prefer is to view by status. This view shows at a single glance which contacts are online and offline, and which contacts are online and currently active in a workspace shared with the user.
Likewise, viewing workspaces by status shows the user which workspaces currently have members working in them.
This unobtrusive peripheral vision into current activity keeps the user aware of who is where and what they are working on. It also presents the user with the opportunity and ability to quickly connect with colleagues in a shared context in a just-in-time fashion.
This unique blend of awareness and workspaces produces a swarming effect, which has become one of the salient benefits of working in Groove Virtual Office.
Alerts
Groove Virtual Office takes this notion of awareness one step further by including alerts. Alerts are visual or audible cue that bring to the user’s attention a changed condition of a contact or a workspace. Unlike email, which comes to us when someone else wants to notify us of something, Groove alerts are configured by the user, letting him be notified only about those conditions that matter. Alerts can be triggered by a variety of events :
Setting audible and visual alerts
· • When a contact’s status changes to online. Sometimes it is important to know when a particular user (e.g., a customer or a colleague in a faraway time zone) has just connected to the network, Groove alerts provide the user with a quick notification.
· • When a workspace has new or modified content. Groove alerts are highly granular, and give the user a high degree of freedom to specify when to be alerted. Alerts can be triggered by all new activity a workspace, or just by entries made in particular tools (e.g., a calendar or meeting entry, a discussion posting, a new or modified file in a specific folder or sub-folder).
· • When a contact has entered a workspace. Sometimes the best time to connect with a contact is when he is currently working on something of mutual interest. Groove alerts notify the user when a workspace that is particularly important has activity occurring.