I've heard a lot about Groove over the past few years but never really had a chance to use it until a few weeks ago. A smallbiztechnology.com reviewer reviewed Groove 2 years ago but now I've been able to use the latest version - 3.0.

I was assisting with the production of my Church's annual music CD and our producer needed a way to share files with the musicians so we used a beta version of Groove 3.0 (now in final release) to collaborate. Although for this particular use, we did not use the full power of Groove, I was able to clearly see how Groove can be a powerful collaboration tool for businesses that need to work together as a team.

Groove's flagship product, Groove Workspace enables feature rich collaboration and communication.

Let's imagine that you have an engineering firm in Atlanta and you need to communicate with engineers, marketing teams and others around the world - or even just within your office.

Instead of using email to send files to your team members and then worrying about who has the latest version - all files can be uploaded to the Groove Workspace. Changed files and new files are then instantly available for members of the project. Files are stored locally on user's computers so they are always available.

Maybe you want to brainstorm on a particular issue and elicit feedback and comments about another project your engineering firm is working on. Simply create a new workspace, invite those members in that project to join and use Groove's built in discussion board.

As with a lot of technology, there's a lot of powerful features that Groove has so its likely that you won't use all of them - but don't worry. The more the better.

One very powerful feature is Groove's forms. You can create your own or use some of Groove's pre-made forms to build interactivity and efficiency into your work.

Maybe you would like your engineers to submit a weekly work update each week. You could design a form to capture this information. Instead of your engineers sending information via email - in various formats, the form could be used to capture the information in a consistent method. The information is then stored and available for easy retrieval.

There's many services that provide one or more of the features Groove provides. Mirra Personal Server for example let's you share a folder on your computer with others. Intranets.com is a POWERFUL application that contains some of the features of Groove Workspace.

However, if working as a team is important to you and you find that you often work on several projects with various team members, Groove is a powerful application to consider.

I really liked how you can set up notifications in Groove to alert you to various actions - new email, new documents, when someone is online and etc. A little icon blinks on your screen and displays text of the notification. You can also have Groove speak the notification to you. Several times in my quiet office, I would then hear "Michael is now online" when our producer would come online.

Like instant messaging applications, Groove is presence aware and lets you know which members of your team are online or not. This small but useful feature is good so that if you want to start a chat session, or just pick up the phone and talk you can.

Groove Workspace is stored on your local computer so you can work with Groove even if you are not online. When you get online, all the changes you made in the Groove Workspace are synchronized with your team members.

While you are correct to think of Groove as a computer program you should also know that it is a "platform". This means that software developers can write their own programs to add additional functionality to it.

Maybe you have a special database that your law office uses. Well a programmer might be able to design a form in Groove that could connect to this database.

If you really want to collaborate, work as a team, manage projects, ensure that your communication is centralized and be able to work even if your are "offline" or not connected to the Internet then give Groove serious consideration.

Article Contributed by: Ramon Ray, Smallbiztechnology.com