In Mary Jo Foley's interview with Rajesh Jha, Corporate VP , Microsoft Office Live, we learned that Groove is being positioned "as the way that users will be able to access documents in their workspaces when they are off-line". Jha also is quoted as saying "Groove will be the way you take any Workspace offline."

Unfortunately, this still doesn't clear up Groove's future since, technically, Groove can do this today by synchronizing with a SharePoint document library. Longer-term, it makes sense to tie Groove and SharePoint together. However, I wouldn't expect this to be an easy task since there is significant overlap in function.

In addition, given the timing of the acquisition and the latest releases of SharePoint and Groove I doubt any accommodating architectural changes have taken place yet. To get these working as an online/offline duo we should see some significant changes under the hood, the least of which would be a common storage model.

However, while they have the hood up and are taking apart the engine Microsoft should consider bringing another piece of their portfolio into the mix. Microsoft OneNote is a fabulous personal information manager (a better description might be a personal information harvester). I have been using it to manage all of my "digital stuff" the past few months and have been very pleased. There is still plenty of room for improvement but, in my opinion, it does a darn good job and is arguably the best of its kind on the market.

OneNote's roots are planted in the Tablet PC. However, I don't use a tablet with OneNote. It's my understanding that 80% or more of OneNote users also do not use a Tablet PC.

One result of this heritage is OneNote's use of a freeform page in which you can embed just about any form of media including text, audio, video, images, and files in general (in addition to "digital ink" from a tablet pen). I personally make liberal use of OneNote's notebook structure to keep my growing personal database of information. I am able to consume all forms of digital information (and some non-digital via a scanner) as I come across it now that I have a place to keep it (and find it later). I also make use of OneNote's tagging capability for GTD-like task management.

In addition, OneNote has some simple collaborative capabilities. An interesting feature I haven't tried yet is the ability to host real-time shared note-taking sessions. This sounds intriguing since a OneNote notebook can become an online meeting's virtual whiteboard. After the meeting the shared notebook continues on as part of the team's normal collaborative (and personal information management) mode of work.

You can also share notebooks between computers allowing team members, for example, to work within the same notebook from different locations and during different times of the day. There are a couple of options to do this. From my experience the best way is via SMB file shares. Just point all instances of OneNote to the same file on the network. This appears to work quite well as I have shared OneNote notebooks between my personal laptop and one I take home from the office. Changes are quickly reflected between the two computers.

Teams can also share OneNote notebooks using SharePoint. This method, however, appears to be a little rough around the edges and if there are a number of changes the synchronization process is quite noticeable. It almost looks as if the entire notebook is being transferred during synchronization but I can't say for sure.

This is where Groove's P2P technology could come into play. Groove's synchronization methods are very robust and from my perspective appear to be much better than OneNote's synchronization using SharePoint. I have used Groove to share workspaces between multiple computers in various locations and I was quite pleased with the performance. This was the case even though one of the laptops involved was constantly going offline and coming back online in multiple places.

So imagine having a server back-end and web interface from SharePoint, synchronization and offline capability with Groove, and a rich collaborative team workspace and personal information management client from OneNote. Now that would be something.

On Sunday Microsoft unveiled plans for Office Live Workspace, touting it as their entry into the free online office suite market. The response, at least from the blogosphere, has been what can best be described as a collective yawn. There was only a brief conversation about it on SlashDot and hardly any presence at all on Digg.

Responses ranged from confusion:

"I wish I could give you a simple explanation of what the company is offering, but, this being Microsoft, what we have is a witch's brew of balkanized services, elaborate brand hierarchies, and jargon out the wazoo."

Nicholas Carr's Rough Type

...to indifference:

"There's nothing even approaching an actual online editor and, frankly, not much to compel anyone to use the new services. In fact, the only thing truly interesting about Office Live Workspace is what it doesn't do: create and edit docs in the browser."

Scott Gilbertson's Wired Blog

...to critical:

"The barbarians are at the gate, a new horde is on the way, but no one seems to be defending the castle. Instead, the Microsoft Office warriors are rebranding, repackaging and relaunching old products and calling them new."

Michael Arrington's TechCrunch

...to insulting:

"Microsoft readies Office Live Workspace, an online storage space for office documents. The catch? You can only edit the spreadsheet, Word doc or slideshow if you have MS Office installed on your computer. Uh, ok."

Lifehacker (the title of the post was "Dumb")

Microsoft Office received more attention for an error in Excel 2007. Adobe received more coverage of its announced acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, an online word processor. Well that might be because it looks like Adobe may actually release an online office suite.

To me it appears Google is making progress convincing the public that online documents offer advantages over the document-as-file paradigm supported by client-based office suites.

It's also not clear if Workspace will be based on SharePoint or something else. The way it is described it sure sounds like SharePoint but nothing from Microsoft actually says it is SharePoint. I only found a brief mention of Workspace being based on SharePoint from Mary Jo Foley's coverage. But then Mary Jo contradicts herself in the same paragraph by saying documents will be viewable in a browser.

• Robert X. Cringely recently learned about telepresence (HD video conferencing) and predicts home-based units, possibly sold by Apple, could be the next "Killer App". Just bring to market an attachable HD video camera for the growing population of HD flat-panel TVs already sitting in American's living room and you have a home version of telepresence. Not ready to buy one yet? Well, Cringely says "This is 100 percent analogous to the introduction of color TV in the 1950s. People didn't know they wanted color TV until they saw color TV. But once they saw it, the lure of color TV was instant and obvious". Just imagine pointing a camera at the typical football fan watching the Lions take on the Packers Sunday afternoon. Smile!

• BusinessWeek.Com just published "BT: Small Firms Snub Videoconferencing " in which "BT's general manager of broadband, VoIP and software services, Chris Lindsay" said "Customers are not seeing the increased benefit from having the visual piece over and above the audio" to explain why demand for video conferencing has been low.

What do you think? Do you need "the visual piece" to effectively collaborate? I don't think you do (in most cases).

To me this looks like a classic example of the type of problem technologists get into as noted by Pip Coburn in his book The Change Function:

"More often than not, products are created in a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality that relies solely upon Moore's Law for lowering prices and what can be called Grove's Law of generating 10x changes and improvements" (from Chapter Two of the Change Function; an abridged version is available at Fast Company).

All we need is a higher resolution video camera and display (which are already in many living rooms btw) along with higher bandwidth. Then, Cringely tells us we simply need to find the price point where it becomes "killer".

The problem is this approach forgets an important point. Does the product solve a problem for the potential customer? Coburn refers to a customer's problem as a "crisis" and says "If the level of crisis is higher than the total perceived pain of adopting a new solution, then a change will occur." By the way, "perceived pain "goes well beyond the cost of the product.

IMHO, put a video conferencing unit into the typical American living room and you will certainly create a crisis. But not the one Cringely would like.

Update: Melanie Turek reports Cisco is considering developing a home telepresence system. Apparently talk about this was hinted at during a discussion with reporters at a recent analyst briefing.

The scenario below is ultimately what we are after when using collaborative technologies. We are trying to collectively manage "information" ("data", "knowledge", pieces of content, files, etc.). Yet, for most of us (including me) we don't even know how to effectively manage our own information. How can we work effectively as a group if we don't have the fundamental skills necessary to work as a group of one?

When do we cross the line of managing "my" information (which is serviced by the technology segment called "personal productivity") to managing "our" information (which qualifies as "collaboration" or "knowledge management")?

To me, it all seems to be on the same continuum. So, how practical is it to enforce a single folder naming or hierarchy convention? In many cases, it may be possible. But for most I suspect the folder metaphor is insufficient and something like tagging may be better since it seems to strike a balance between personal preferences and group needs.

However, I am starting to think the best place to start is to train employees to manage their own information better. All collaboration initiatives are based on these fundamantal information management skills.

A few days ago, some of the senior leaders within our team got together to set out some "standards" for how we capture and manage information in our organization. Specifically, we decided to share information more effectively by storing the files and information we create for various consulting opportunities in a file structure that will make it easier to find and use information. Rather than each person creating and managing their own filing structure and guiding others to information, we're trying an agreed, standardized file structure based on a "taxonomy" we pulled together over a few hours.

Link to Thinking Faster: Organizing Information

Last week BusinessWeek's Rob Hof asked "What Did Cisco's $3.2 Billion for WebEx Buy?"

Rob's choices were:

 

1) A channel for its cool telepresence system, according to Sean Ness.

2) A pig in a poke, opines Mike Arrington and a number of commenters on his post. They figure WebEx is too heavy compared to a number of up-and-coming Web conferencing services, and doesn't work as well on different platforms.

3) The future of collaboration, according to Om Malik, who points out, "Shared workspaces, email and even office type apps are part of WebEx’s extended offerings." And WebEx has 2 million customers already.

4) Sex appeal, says Valleywag. Huh? Only in the Valley, I guess.

I just posted a blog on Collaboration Loop about the deal. My view is closer to Arrington's, but for different reasons.

Update: My Collaboration Loop posts have been moved over to the Enterprise 2.0 Blog. The link above has been changed to point to the new location.