While many of us clamour to keep up with so many of these social networking sites I am more than happy to have my workspaces where I can keep in contact with the people that mean the most to me (okay it’s all business contacts except for user and community project groups, but as Groove is put into some other versions of Office (PLEASE) I see this changing. And since Groove has this neat alert that appears quietly at the bottom of my screen and then hides itself until you scroll over it, unlike IM (MAKE ME CRAZY ORANGE FLASHES) I can peek at and decide when I am ready to deal with a Groove IM or a new file or message when it suits me. I also don’t feel the stress to update my “What Elisabeth is doing now....” Who cares if I’m about to ship my teenagers off to Siberia (one way ticket).
With Groove I can decide who I want to be in my group and certainly not have to worry about “outsiders” if I am the only one making the invites! I also find the fact that everything is encrypted, sending files and messages back and forth is not a big concern for me.
I think people only have to see the simplicity, security and offline beauty that Groove offers and they will start to see this as an alternative to too much “in your face” sites that we all know and sometimes quite rightly despise.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Safe Social Networking. In one word – Groove
The more horror stories I hear about children becoming victim to individuals who do not have their best interests in mind on the net, the more I realize that collaboration tools like Groove present another opportunity, as truly safe social networking environments for young kids and teens. Let me explain.
Groove allows controlled workspaces, where only individuals who have received an invitation from the workspace manager may enter into this space, where anything from document sharing to calendaring and the all important chat and message sending tools are embedded. (Groove’s calendaring makes for simple “play date” coordination; and the kids get to work with and learn time management skills. {In white paper go into the potential in time to send the calendar reminders to parents Outlook} Because it is a dynamic collaboration tool children (with parental consent) can easily add new friends. As impatient as children can be on long trips, they can also use Groove to prepare messages, load holiday pictures and videos, prepare travel blogs and then have them automatically sync with their friend’s spaces as soon as an internet link is established. (In fact this could be used as a family collaborative space where children and their grandparents can communicate in safety too.)
In a perfect world turning to this kind of business tool would not be worth considering. However there have been some serious events because trusting children have opened themselves up to interacting with what they think is someone that is a similar age. And soon some of these children are lured to parks and amusement places where they find that their 11 year old buddy is a 42 year old pedophile. In many cases these children escape scared but unscathed but it is a sad truth that the mental and physical scars of some of these encounters are frightening.
Groove represents an opportunity for parents to provide a safe haven for children to interact with others without compromising their safety, until they are old enough to be taught safe surfing skills. This also means children can be safely left to “play” on their own, something that has been inherently dangerous, even with the net aware products. A good predator will never break the boundaries of these tools but rather work around them. With Groove there are never opportunities for this to happen. The only caveat is the trust within the parental circles of your own social network. Nothing is perfect but Groove can, with the will of the right executives be turned into the best protector yet of our most precious asset....our children.
Groove allows controlled workspaces, where only individuals who have received an invitation from the workspace manager may enter into this space, where anything from document sharing to calendaring and the all important chat and message sending tools are embedded. (Groove’s calendaring makes for simple “play date” coordination; and the kids get to work with and learn time management skills. {In white paper go into the potential in time to send the calendar reminders to parents Outlook} Because it is a dynamic collaboration tool children (with parental consent) can easily add new friends. As impatient as children can be on long trips, they can also use Groove to prepare messages, load holiday pictures and videos, prepare travel blogs and then have them automatically sync with their friend’s spaces as soon as an internet link is established. (In fact this could be used as a family collaborative space where children and their grandparents can communicate in safety too.)
In a perfect world turning to this kind of business tool would not be worth considering. However there have been some serious events because trusting children have opened themselves up to interacting with what they think is someone that is a similar age. And soon some of these children are lured to parks and amusement places where they find that their 11 year old buddy is a 42 year old pedophile. In many cases these children escape scared but unscathed but it is a sad truth that the mental and physical scars of some of these encounters are frightening.
Groove represents an opportunity for parents to provide a safe haven for children to interact with others without compromising their safety, until they are old enough to be taught safe surfing skills. This also means children can be safely left to “play” on their own, something that has been inherently dangerous, even with the net aware products. A good predator will never break the boundaries of these tools but rather work around them. With Groove there are never opportunities for this to happen. The only caveat is the trust within the parental circles of your own social network. Nothing is perfect but Groove can, with the will of the right executives be turned into the best protector yet of our most precious asset....our children.
Support Groups
I recently organized another fundraiser for the MS Super Cities Walk. On my way to the MVP Summit I met a brand new MVP whose husband was afflicted with MS about a year and a half ago. My best friend from high school has been living with this scary disease for about 20 years (maybe more since she always seemed to be suffering from what they thought was meningitis). For much of that time she has been dealt some serious threats to her vision and the daily injections are mind numbing. I couldn’t fathom doing this. As we talked I wondered what support was out there for families. There are support groups as with most diseases but what struck me more was the fact that a web based one for epilepsy sufferers had recently been hacked and on the screen was a flash type file that could cause epileptic seizures, rendering the person to potential death . Now as silly as it sounds Groove actually would have prevented this or at least make the perpetrator traceable. With control over the workspace as tight or as loose as you desire, groups such as this would greatly benefit from a more “safe” environment. What seems so simple could actual prevent one death or many more.
Groove the SPAM killer OR Reason no. 1,985,433 to use Groove
I have a customer who complained once again about the amount of spam that seemed to be distracting as the Montreal team was trying to collaborate with their colleagues in Boston on an SOP (Statement of Procedure). The biopharma industry is very much about collaboration; such is the history of scientists working the world over to find a cure for whatever has been ailing us. Unfortunately much of this is done via email and the caveat is while we can have nice neat folders that you can have your emails drop into automatically, it was getting overwhelmingly frustrating to try to sift through emails from new colleagues as new collaborators were added on a fairly frequent basis.
I had suggested that this is exactly where Groove shines. Opening a workspace for an SOP meant that the head of the project controlled contributors, content and it could be open to collaborators globally without having to worry about the network servers. The second important point was that as changes or messages came in they popped up in their own corner space and everyone was immediately able to view whatever it was that had been dropped into the workspace without opening anything! It was all encrypted. Research is an expensive business and having it secure is a priority.
What is popping up in Groove is priority items as determined by the user and this makes it far easier to keep people from being distracted by spam or searching for new colleagues. To this firm distractions caused by constant individual email filtering (getting people to use folders and rules doesn’t come easy nor is it useful with new people popping in and out the groups) was a concern. Productivity is first and foremost important in most people’s minds.
Finally when the SOP is finished and its time to move onto the next SOP there are important options besides the obvious ability to replicate the workspace. Documents can be moved to Sharepoint for retention and future workflow processing, they can be moved there to go through final approval processing, The workspace itself can be kept intact or revamped by adding or removing collaborators, and documentation, its name easily modified and new tools added or taken away (example calendaring, notes, pictures).
In a world where there are far too many distractions and spam a continual fight to control, Groove offers Spam free collaboration which is easier to ensure better productivity among its users.
I had suggested that this is exactly where Groove shines. Opening a workspace for an SOP meant that the head of the project controlled contributors, content and it could be open to collaborators globally without having to worry about the network servers. The second important point was that as changes or messages came in they popped up in their own corner space and everyone was immediately able to view whatever it was that had been dropped into the workspace without opening anything! It was all encrypted. Research is an expensive business and having it secure is a priority.
What is popping up in Groove is priority items as determined by the user and this makes it far easier to keep people from being distracted by spam or searching for new colleagues. To this firm distractions caused by constant individual email filtering (getting people to use folders and rules doesn’t come easy nor is it useful with new people popping in and out the groups) was a concern. Productivity is first and foremost important in most people’s minds.
Finally when the SOP is finished and its time to move onto the next SOP there are important options besides the obvious ability to replicate the workspace. Documents can be moved to Sharepoint for retention and future workflow processing, they can be moved there to go through final approval processing, The workspace itself can be kept intact or revamped by adding or removing collaborators, and documentation, its name easily modified and new tools added or taken away (example calendaring, notes, pictures).
In a world where there are far too many distractions and spam a continual fight to control, Groove offers Spam free collaboration which is easier to ensure better productivity among its users.
Look Teach! We’re on Time!
I’m one of those parents who HATES it with a passion when teachers doll out group assignments. It always ends up that someone doesn’t do their part and takes credit for everyone else’s work. Then there are the people whose pieces show up at 10:00p.m the night before it’s due and my poor kid is up till last midnight not only inserting it but most likely rewriting it because it sucks.
This is where we got the bright idea of using Groove as a “teachers’ monitor”. Putting a few kids on a 30 day version we experimented with a recent religion assignment (which the kids just love doing) and initially without the teacher we replaced her with me. I watched as the pieces started no coming in. I contacted parents and put out a few “reminders”. When the kids started to see how it kept track of messages (one girl got frustrated and started to threaten not to do her part i was quick to remind her that her comments were in stone and she better get back to work or the headmaster could get printed copies of sad threats.
As the deadline was closing in the final version was coming together nicely when one girl “forgot” she had a hockey tournament. That’s fine i said. You have a laptop and so type on the bus and when you get to the hotel you’ll sync automatically with the group, doesn’t matter where you are. That evening they hit hot spot at a Dunkin Donuts and there it was, the last piece of the project.. It was done before the weekend started and everyone had earned their part of the marks.
This also made it simple to know who to dock marks for plagiarism and how much each person truly committed to the entire project.
For teachers this means that should they adopt this methodology they can themselves be more in tune to the progress (or lack thereof and can provide much needed guidance, conveniently, at a distance whic makes their lives easier too!
This is where we got the bright idea of using Groove as a “teachers’ monitor”. Putting a few kids on a 30 day version we experimented with a recent religion assignment (which the kids just love doing) and initially without the teacher we replaced her with me. I watched as the pieces started no coming in. I contacted parents and put out a few “reminders”. When the kids started to see how it kept track of messages (one girl got frustrated and started to threaten not to do her part i was quick to remind her that her comments were in stone and she better get back to work or the headmaster could get printed copies of sad threats.
As the deadline was closing in the final version was coming together nicely when one girl “forgot” she had a hockey tournament. That’s fine i said. You have a laptop and so type on the bus and when you get to the hotel you’ll sync automatically with the group, doesn’t matter where you are. That evening they hit hot spot at a Dunkin Donuts and there it was, the last piece of the project.. It was done before the weekend started and everyone had earned their part of the marks.
This also made it simple to know who to dock marks for plagiarism and how much each person truly committed to the entire project.
For teachers this means that should they adopt this methodology they can themselves be more in tune to the progress (or lack thereof and can provide much needed guidance, conveniently, at a distance whic makes their lives easier too!
Groove in the Community
Probably one of the hardest things to coordinate is a fundraiser especially as so many people can change from year to year and keeping track of what was done one year to then next is a trip in itself. In creating a workspace in Groove the main players are able to kick into gear immediately once the current year’s event is over by simply changing a date e.g. MS Super Cities Walk 2007 becomes MS Super Cities Walk 2008. The forms, the fundraising group info. totals, sponsors, volunteers, etc can all neatly be subdivided into other folders and if necessary separate workspaces if, for instance, training information is to be coordinated and provided . With the newness of Groove, having all the volunteers on it might not make sense BUT with synchronization to Sharepoint taking the final documentation and training materials and synching them with a Sharepoint site makes the year to year management much more controllable. Since cost is also a big issue for many organizations Groove offer a very cost effective but secure solution that is above all so easy for most people to implement i.e. big IT bills they can’t afford are avoided. The issue usually is in understanding how to properly manage a workspace which we’ll take about later. For the smallest to the larger non-profits Groove can allow for you to keep more money in the hands of researchers, to find the cure!
Sunday, June 10, 2007
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.
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.
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