Groove Software Development Kit

[Ily]

Hello,

i am a 23 year old CS student from Romania. I have used Groove for about 2
years working for an IT company.

This year i have to create a final project for my University degree. For
some time i have been experimenting with Groove web services and i think
there are some really great things which can be built. As such i would really
like to create a Groove tool, but in order to do this i need to obtain the
GDK.

I have contacted Groove about this (as it seems the kit is not longer
available online).

Is anyone here able to tell me if the GDK is still available (and how i can
obtain it), or if there is any way i can create a Groove tool with version 3
or version 12 (not really relevant).

Thank you,
Ily//

 

[Omkar]

Hi Ily,

I think you can get the GDK at following url

http://www.groove.net/solutions/develop/downloads.cfm

Regards,
Omkar S. Bapat

 

[Ily]

From the Groove site:
"If you're interested in developing with Web Services, The Groove Web
Services GDK contains everything you need to get started, and it's free! "


This GDK contains everything RELATED TO WEBSERVICES development. What i am
interested in is to develop a tool. And for that i require another SDK which
apparently used to be available on the web site.

Thank you for the link... but it does not help very much because it's not
what i am looking for.

Ily//

 

[Hugh Pyle [MSFT]]

There is no support in Groove V3.1 or Groove 2007 for building "custom
tools" which run inside the workspace. The two extensibility mechanisms
supported in Groove are: custom Forms-based tools, and Web Services.

--
Hugh Pyle / Program Manager / Microsoft Office Groove
http://blogs.msdn.com/hughpyle/

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


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[Ily]

Hugh,

I found out at some point that the GDK to develop custom tools will be
available only to Microsoft Partners.

Can you confirm this? Or is the case that there will be absolutely no way to
develop a custom tool in Groove anymore? Is it possible that you can justify
this decision maybe (not that you have to… or anything like that)?

The reason I am asking this is because I feel very strongly about the fact
that I don’t think Groove Forms is powerful enough to support implementing
some complex tool (like: a files tool which supports version control or
document approval workflow).

Of course my experience in these matters is very limited and I could be very
wrong .

Ily //

 

[Hugh Pyle [MSFT]]

You're right that the Forms tool is not completely general-purpose; the form
and scripting capabilities are not as powerful as (say) a WinForms
environment. So, there are some types of workgroup activity which can't be
supported with forms tools inside the Groove workspace. Several of those
activities can be implemented very effectively using an external application
which communicates using Groove Web Services APIs.

There is no "special secret GDK". What you see is what you get: forms and
web services.

There was in the past a series of COM- and interop-based APIs which were
very powerful, but also quite difficult to use; we deprecated all those
options before Groove became part of Microsoft (due in part to the support
costs and limited resources in our development organization). We're
actively looking for ways to extend Groove's programmability options in the
future, since there's a great set of activities which can benefit from
Groove's workspace environment and infrastructure and which can't easily be
implemented with alternative technologies. We don't have any concrete
details of these future plans available at this stage, though.

Hope this helps -

--
Hugh Pyle / Program Manager / Microsoft Office Groove
http://blogs.msdn.com/hughpyle/

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


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