Groove Business Case #2 - from a bright idea halfway across the world

We all know how important security is in a world that is ripe with those that wish to make a mockery of the benefits of technology thus we have firewalls, passwords, intranets, and layers of protection that sometimes do more to hinder creativity and communication than we would like. That means that our companies have had to make it harder for those to get at our intellectual property & client information and for good reason. So when I was recently stuck in an airport between flights I became acutely aware that I had the answer to a bottleneck in a process and how much I wanted to get a matter dealt with but didn't want to risk going through our servers through an ISP I wouldn't know and couldn't necessarily trust.


Voila Groove!


Using my Groove account on my laptop and that of a colleague I desperately needed to communicate with, I had my documents being reviewed and discussing changes LIVE while the airline decided how many more parts they would ship down to the airport before giving up and putting us more than 12 hours behind schedule. Needless to say the rest of the crew was brought up to speed on the same Groove workspace and the project was back on track. We synched the documents with our Sharepoint server and the rest, as they say, is history.

Okay except for the part where I arrived at my destination at 3 in the morning with a meeting scheduled at 7:30 a.m. Yeah Groove fixed that too. I put a msg out to my client with whom I had a workspace set up to show him our progress and he gladly gave me that extra 30 minutes I lovingly spent catching up on emails.

Groove Business case #1 - two small entrepreneurs make a big noise

Olivia and Nancy, two business owners, in different fields, but with the same end client in mind have been working together for 1 1/2 years appearing as a united front for projects all over town but have found the disjoint from communicating with suppliers and clients to keeping track of tasks has them worried they will not grow to be able to compete with the larger production firms in the area. In some cases they doubled up on orders for anything from refreshments to staffing for events.

When Olivia saw a demo for Sharepoint it opened her eyes to the possibilities of some serious collaboration BUT it was cost prohibitive, but more importantly way beyond what they required to solve and grow their business pains at this point in their business.

That's when we introduced Groove. For these two entrepreneurs the ability to set up work spaces devoted to each project was the biggest step in organizing and knowing at what point each event was at in terms of preparedness.

The projects were visible, any communication was directed at the specific event easily and by eventually joining in their major supplier, the panicked phone tag and silly errors were stopped in their tracks. Changes to orders were easily alerted to the proper persons and keeping even the client updated, depending on the level of involvement they wanted to have, was easily restricted to their particular event only.

For small businesses that need to work together to catch the "bigger fish", Groove answered the most basic critical businesses issues.