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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | JULY 21, 2003 TECHNOLOGY By Lisa Miller For Some, the Godsend of Groove It wasn't designed for small outfits, but entrepreneurs have become some of the online-collaboration service's most ardent advocates
Welcome to the collaboration woes of the small-business world. Technology was supposed to usher in the virtual office, but for many smaller outfits, the wider world beyond the cubicle doesn't go much further than e-mails and instant messaging. While it's better than costly phone calls, e-mail is an unwieldy way to work on projects that require team feedback on documents, real-time collaboration, brainstorming, or other forms of multiple-party communication. Stephen L. Davis, CEO and principal of Seattle-based MTG Management Consultants, is plenty familiar with these difficulties. With as many as 25 consultants spending their days in planes en route to clients, Davis needed an easy way to keep everyone connected. "The traditional sharing mechanism of setting up an internal intranet Web site -- that technology didn't lend itself to having the information offline when you're not connected," Davis says. "Being in the office was rare for us, and so that was the piece that we were mostly concerned about: Making sure that when we were at our clients' sites or we were in airports or wherever, we could access information." Davis found what he craved when he discovered a product launched by Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes fame. Called Groove and sold through Groove Networks, a private company founded by Ozzie in 1997 and based in Beverly, Mass., the software offers small businesses an inexpensive way to collaborate effectively without investing in an IT department or even setting up a server (see BW Online, 7/21/03, "Our Biggest Competitor...Is the Status Quo") . READY AND WAITING. Instead, Groove taps the power of each user's computer, capitalizing on today's fast, big-memory hard drives. When members of a Groove workspace use the Internet, the software looks for other members, links to the Groove documents on their hard drives, and then syncs them, so everything is updated. It tracks document versions, noting who made changes when, and if some team members aren't online, it stores new information in a Groove Networks relay server until they log on. For a budget-friendly, one-time fee of $69 to $180 per user, small companies can download the software, install it, and start creating workspaces for different projects, controlling which employees get access to what. As the needs of a particular project shift, new people can be added or removed. Groove is integrated with standard Windows products, such as Microsoft Outlook, Office, and Sharepoint, as well as Lotus Notes, so businesses can keep using the programs they already have. Davis says using Groove has reduced his need to travel, increased the information flow between himself and his consultants and clients, and allowed him to track projects more easily. "It gives me and my two partners [a chance] to oversee all of the work that our staff is doing," Davis explains. "We don't have them e-mail things to us so we can look at it. By the time they e-mail it to us and I look at it, it's already out of date. This way, I can kind of real-time monitor the development of something -- whether it's a proposal that we're writing for a consultant or it's a report or some kind of deliverable, we can look and see their progress." Recently, this helped Davis catch a problem in a proposal before it went out to a client. Cooling his heels after an evening out on the town, Davis was online, checking new proposals in a Groove workspace set up for that purpose. NO LOST FILES. "I went to look at [the proposal] to see that it was really on target, because I didn't know the client very well. Sure enough, I looked and it was wrong. The person in charge of it was online also, so I was able to instant message him [through Groove] and say, 'You know, what's going on here, this isn't right.' And so they fixed it that night in time to get it out the next day. From a business-development point of view, if I lose that project, that could be a couple hundred thousand dollars."
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