Huh... no wonder Groove spits out funky and proprietary staff. It is Microsoft and you cannot blame them, they never saw any need for standards in the way you and me might understand them. They only just saw the need of Microsoft-internal interoperability. To visualize Microsofts problem, you might find it interesting to watch Apple latest TV ads, especially the "Network" one. "Dozo yorushiku onegai shimas!" - "Wait wait wait you speak her language?!" - "Shure, hajimemashite!" - "Hello??? Bon Giorno??!"...

Oh, sorry, here's the link: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Those ads are great. If only we all used Macs and were standards compliant, the world would be a better place.

The problem with the whole Mac issue is that so much of the world now uses Windows, and I am reluctant to buy a Mac and then find that a piece of specialised software I need to use has only been developed for Windows (and for me, this is actually quite likely).

"Standards" is a tricky thing: wherever MS or Windows dominates, surely it is the de facto standard? Etc, etc.

Unfortunately I reckon all minority systems might one day have to accept that they need to make themselves interoperable with the majority system which has become the de facto standard, no matter how poor that standard may be. I don't agree with this principle, I just think it might be the best way of enabling the minority systems to have a stab at becoming the majority: ease migration wherever possible.

The problem here comes when a company used to being the "majority" (MS) produces something when there's already a standard or two in use and forgets that it is probably too late to set the standard as a de facto by itself.

On the other hand, although I've never heard of "Groove" it may be that it currently is bigger than Google. In which case, maybe the onus is on Google to read Groove output? Presumably the Google Calendar is still beta. Maybe it's already in the pipeline.

So... that was either very much a statement of the obvious or a bit controversial.

Groove... *sigh*...

In my company I'm actually forced to use Groove, "because it's sooooo convenient".



I just wanted to add that not only the calendar export sucks, but that your whole content is locked up in there! Furthermore, they could have used some existing standard for their instant-messaging, so one could use some other client (Gaim, etc...).



The forum-like feature of Groove doesn't even have a search function (how odd is that?)! ...and it's sending all of your data over *their* servers, so I wouldn't put any sensitive information in there, anyway.

Short: If you can, please keep your hands off of this proprietary monster.

(I was already about to combine existing standard tools like phpBB, mysql, jabber, rsync and svn - to replace it completely, but since it has been bought by M$ and integrated in the Office suite, I'm afraid that it will be too late to counteract)