Microsoft

Jeff Raikes interview in InfoWorld.

InfoWorld: But with the edge services project that Ozzie is working on, do you see that as having implications for SharePoint directly, or is that just a solo group initiative?

Raikes: Yes we're working closely with him on that. I mean, that was one of our goals with the .Net platform and that's an example of that technical collaboration. But in this context I was more thinking about how you can start out in a peer-to-peer environment and, as it grows into something that's more broadly used, you may want to get it into more of a robust managed server environment. And he has that model and that's a little different than the Edge services project. That's the idea of Groove having servers that allow corporations to do some of what they do in terms of a service.

That's an interesting (and to me unexpected) perspective. Groove has long had the capability to provide "central peers", via the Enterprise Integration Server aka Bot server, and that's a great integration point: the server is always-on, can live behind the firewall next to your internal enterprise servers, yet function as a peer in spaces shared with external participants.

Of course we're also building strong Sharepoint integration, and there's a lot of sense in taking Groove shared spaces -- starting out in a peer-to-peer environment -- and moving some of that to a wider, or more occasional, or more "repository-like" environment: STS, SPS and so forth. Weblogs, even. Hmmm....!

Meanwhile, Phil Wainewright thinks that Microsoft is "suddenly faced with the prospect that its championing of XML web services is about to cannabalize its almost total dominance of the desktop software market". I honestly don't get that. What sort of client software should function as a web service? (hmmm....!)