Groove Networks Inc. is expected to release version 2.5 of its Groove Workspace peer-to-peer collaboration software by the end of the year, offering improved support for .Net and Web services integration.
This version will include a new .Net development tool, the Groove Toolkit for Visual Studio.net, which company officials say will make it easier and faster to build and deploy customer applications in Groove.
Also featured in this release will be the Groove Web Services area, giving developers a new route to integrating Groove with other applications using SOAP. Customers will be able to build Groove-awareness into other applications—so called contextual collaboration—rather than building applications inside the Groove environment.
Groove Workspace 2.5 will also feature improved integration with Microsoft Outlook, supporting Outlook calendars, meetings and contacts, and new integration with Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, which will allow Groove developers to synchronize SharePoint sites in a Groove space so that they can be used offline and extended outside the corporate firewall.
Groove 2.5 will also support “asymmetric files”—the ability to share files with other members of a shared space but to have control over whether these files are actually distributed immediately to all the other users. This allows users to pull down only the files they need to each machine. That feature is expected to be most useful for remote users sharing large document libraries, officials said.