Beverly, Mass. — Long before the Internet became a household word, Ray Ozzie envisioned a networked world where people collaborated with ease regardless of the time or their location.
For that, he created Lotus Notes, which enabled employees within companies to form teams and share notes, documents and e-mail. Since 1989, Notes has sold more than 75 million copies.
Now, Ozzie is carrying his vision a step further. Within a few weeks he'll release Groove, which promises to improve how people work together even if they work for different companies.
And if it catches on the way the Notes did, Groove could profoundly change how employees, friends and families interact.
Imagine individuals in three different time zones all working on the same sketchpad or whiteboard tracking changes and new diagrams together. Or viewing the same video presentation. Or editing text documents simultaneously.
All the while, they are communicating via text chat or voice without having to pick up a telephone. With Groove, they can also follow Web links together.
"Groove is intended to be a very flexible environment that brings together the right people with the right information and the right tools for that information at the right times," Ozzie said. "I've got great hopes for it."
Other companies, too, are looking to accomplish what Groove claims to have done and many analysts believe Microsoft Corp. will want such capabilities in its .NET strategy for moving collaborative computing to the Internet.
"It is competitive, but Groove is the first one out of the gates in a serious way," said Brock Reeve, an analyst with Viant Corp. in Boston.
Bringing people together
Ford Calhoun, chief information officer at drug company GlaxoSmithKline, gets new product pitches constantly and often ignores them. For him, Groove was different.
"The reason one is willing to look at this with full intensity early in its life cycle is because of the reputation of Ray Ozzie," Calhoun said. "The guy, with Notes, totally changed the way many people are able to collaborate and do work."
Groove is essentially a software platform that companies and individuals can build upon. It's not designed to replace existing software applications but rather to let people use those applications in new ways.
The software uses a peer-to-peer approach that largely bypasses the performance constraints of computing that revolves around centralized servers.
Groove is somewhat like a Napster for businesses, except Ozzie started work on it years before the online music-swapping service emerged.
As a computer science student at the University of Illinois during the 1970s, Ozzie was exposed to PLATO, an online system linking universities through bulletin boards. Upon graduating, he discovered that the business world was largely devoid of such tools and set out to change that.
"My passion has been in using technology to, in some way, shape or form, augment human interaction," Ozzie said. "Lotus Notes was all about bringing people together."
As he worked on Notes, Ozzie began to notice changes in ways companies interacted.
Instead of working on everything in-house, companies began partnering with outside firms to divide tasks. More and more, employees needed to go outside their organizations for knowledge or to complete projects.
But Notes wasn't really designed to cross corporate boundaries, given security firewalls and other hurdles, Ozzie said.
Groove intends to address Notes' shortcomings, Ozzie said, by "bringing the spontaneity of e-mail, phone and fax to individuals who need to work together regardless of whether they're in-house or in another company."
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