You've probably heard of Groove Networks, which was founded by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie. The company recently shipped a new version of its Groove Workspace collaboration application, and in this DominoPower exclusive, we've asked Groove's Donna Carvalho to explain how Notes can be most effectively integrated with this new product.

Stop for a minute and count how many times you've been involved in one of the following two scenarios:

• You and five team members are engaged in a weeklong email exchange to develop an agenda for that critical meeting or event. Your team naturally includes colleagues, but likely also includes a business partner, contractor, or maybe even a customer. All of you have been collaborating on the agenda, and each person has several iterations of the document attached to a series of messages (subject: re:re:re:re: agenda) in their various in-boxes (or maybe you decided to detach and folder one version but can't remember if it's the most recent one). You really want to be doing this in your Notes database but can't because your partner, contractor, and customer cannot access it.

• You've finished the set of documents for that key project, which are stored in a Notes database. Because you used Notes, getting approvals on the documents from key people inside your organization was a breeze, and you have a detailed chronology of each version and its author. But now it's time to share the documents with your external partners, so you move them out of Notes into an email. Refer back to the previous scenario.

See what I'm getting at? Notes is a perfect tool for storing and organizing information centrally for a variety of collaborative business processes (document reviews, discussions, forums, etc). But a Notes database isn't easily extended to others in another organization. Sure, it's possible, as long as both organizations have Domino and agree to the exchange of public keys required to replicate the database. This is an ideal solution for long-term, defined collaboration needs, but it fails to address the short term, ad hoc collaboration needs of the smaller, cross-company teams that we all find ourselves a part of these days.

To date, the tool of choice for sharing information with others outside the company has been email. Why? It works. It's direct, immediate, easy to use, and most importantly, it works across the firewall. But unfortunately, email's ease-of-use can often be a burden, as indicated in the aforementioned scenarios.