With the availability of Office 2007 comes a new version of Groove 2007. I must admit that I was never a big user of Groove, but I'm trying to look more into the product to see what I've been missing. A really cool feature of this product is something that all users of multiple machines should get to know. It's called "File Share Workspace".
File Share Workspace allows me to select a folder that I have on a given machine and set it for synchronization. I like to personally think of it as a "Roaming Folder". As you can have the contents of this folder "roam" on any Windows computer where you have Groove installed (of course you can select to sync the content on that computer or not).
So let me paint the scenario that I have and how I use it…
- Home PC – I have a home computer where I do a lot of web reading, documentation writing (dual monitor), software evaluation and testing using Virtual Server, and I use it for picture, videos and more. It's running Windows Server 2003
- Work Laptop – I have a work laptop that I use for customer demos, connect to corporate network to do internal training and download internal software, and I work on Microsoft related content. This is a Compaq nc8430 running Windows Vista Enterprise. (Intel Centrino Duo Core, 4GB RAM…I love it).
- Work Laptop (secondary) – This is a backup machine that I use for some Windows and Exchange server demo's. it's not as strong as the first machine, but I need it in case the other laptop goes crazy. For now I use it as a client machine when doing BDD deployment demo's using the primary laptop (all in Virtual PC) as the BDD deployment environment.
So as you can see here, I have three machines that I'm pretty active with. What I need is to have all of my important information (presentations, documentation, and tools) with me and always up to date. One of the key features of Windows (2000, XP, 2003, and Vista) is the ability to have an Offline version of some content. In order to make this happen in my scenario, I would have to setup a share where all of my machines could sync with. I would then need to setup a each machine to use the content of that share for offline use. This works pretty well, but it's a lot of moving parts and I have to ensure that when I get back home that I sync with the main share and I "hope" that they all get updated with the same data.
In walks Groove!
With Groove, I create a new folder on my local drive (you could do this within My Documents as well, but then this gets weird if your company uses My Documents Folder Redirection), right-click on that folder and select "Groove Folder Synchronization" from the context-menu and then click on "Start synchronizing …". You'll get asked if your "sure" (click Yes) and then your off! Now you go to your other machines and you'll see a new workspace in your "Workspaces" list on the Groove Launchbar. You now only need to right click on that workspace and select "Get Workspace" to now synchronize that content on your local computer. That's it! Groove will now take care of keeping all of the content in that folder up to date for you. So no more figuring out if you downloaded that content on your home machine, work laptop, or work desktop. This is great for mobile users that use many machines (like me) in order to do their job.
For more information on Groove 2007, please visit: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx
Also, here is the description on "file sharing workspaces" from the Groove 2007 documentation. I thought it might also help…
A file sharing workspace is a special type of Groove workspace that enables you to share the contents of a folder in your Windows file system across all computers on which you have your Groove account, and with other Groove users by invitation.
Note: File sharing workspaces are not supported on computers running a 64-bit operating system.