Microsoft Groove Evaluation Project - Final Report

Abstract

Can student groups effectively plan and conduct meetings using a collaborative software product? This was our fundamental question as we set out to analyze Microsoft Groove's utility as a meeting tool. Microsoft Groove (or 'Groove') is an application designed to allow distributed teams to collaborate on documents, plan and conduct meetings, and share information. Groove is intended for corporate use, but we were curious to find out how Groove would perform for students, who normally have looser meeting agendas and structure. We decided to conduct ethnographic studies to analyze how student meetings in Groove compared to student meetings in person.

Based on our research, findings and user feedback, we developed a set of recommendations that would help Groove become a more productive student group meeting tool. We recommended that Groove increase awareness of other members' activity by implementing desktop sharing capabilities and user status icons. We also suggested that Groove improve its chat tool by enabling side conversations and improving notifications of new chat entries. Finally, we recommended that Groove enhance the meeting tool by improving meeting agenda visibility and design, placing the meeting tool in its own window, and allowing meetings to vary in rigidity and structure. This study suggests that while Groove is not an ideal student group meeting tool, its features can allow groups to communicate through more channels than chat alone. With some usability enhancements, Groove could become a more widely-used collaboration tool among student groups.