5 Keywords: Groove, Group Work, Project, Organisation, Collaboration

Groove is great for collaborative projects. I almost insist, now, upon its use by those involved in my projects.

This is because of a few really great features:

• Centralised location for project organisation
  When creating a workspace, you must enrol people into it. These people can be given roles and permissions. The shared calendar is great for organising your project's timeline and getting that information out to your team. It can be used to arrange meetings, set deadlines and milestones, and will even remind people of events.
• Distributes files to everyone
  When a file is dropped into the Groove workspace, it appears on everyone else's computer almost instantly. Anyone with permission can work on a file in the Groove workspace, so it inherently provides a superb framework for peer review - when I'm not working on my sections, I can review other peoples' to suggest improvements and check that we have continuity.
• Task-tracking and Meeting minutes
  Groove can be used to circulate meeting minutes as Word files. Alternatively, there is a Meetings plugin, which allows you to set an agenda, attendees and actions. The status of actioned items can be tracked after the meeting, to ensure their completion. The Issue Tracking section is useful for keeping an eye on people's tasks and assigning work. It also makes a rather useful bug-tracking centre, for coding projects.
• Integrated chat
  Groove also features a chat feature identical to most IM services. However, Groove logs all chat history and distributes it to everyone, regardless of whether they are in the chat or not. Provided this is used for discussion, anyone can look up details in the history that they may otherwise have to email about and wait for.