he architect's work has allways been related to a physical space, the office, where different agents involved used the available tools for each architectural project. At best, this process was complemented by the intervention of external agents (artists, engineers) that would cooperate in the project. However, with the recent specialization of many professions, and specially because of the revolution of information and communication brought by Internet, workgroups are scattering more and more. Certainly, it's not usual yet to speak about telework in architecture, but workgroups, competitions and work offers are gradually spreading around the territory. From offices divided in different cities, which allows them to cover a wider zone, to circumstancial collaborations between different professionals around a specific project.
We are not trying here to propose new ways of working, bat showing one of multiple tools that can be used, hoping it to be suggestive in order to open new possibilities. It is worth insisting on the term multiple : not only referrig to the environment (Internet, mobile phones, satellits, etc.) but to the great amount of existing programs, utilities and devices, from chats to VoIP systems, from SMS to videoconference, from interactive maps to satellite tracking.
We are going to speak specifically about Groove , one of the so called "virtual office" programs. The concept is based on the necessity of grouping together various communication and management utilities in a secure and user-friendly way. The program itself exists since many years, but it has remained relatively unknown until, recently, Microsoft bought the rights and added it to the 2007 version of the Office suite. Apart from some minor graphic changes, the program is still almost identical to its original. Basically, Groove contains some tools that normally work as separate applications, allowing access to many different communication ways in only one program. It is, strictly speaking, a virtual office that works within an encrypted environment that can only be entered by autorized or invited users -as actual offices do.
In order to give a global view of its contents, we are going to describe its most commonly used features:
The first thing that appears when opening the application is a simple control panel that allows the user to see at a glance the status of all contacts and workspaces(which are equivalent to the "rooms" of that virtual office).
The first tool you will see when opening a workspace (remember that in each workspace we can choose which tool we want to use and how to arrange them), is a shared files explorer. You can open a file, work on it, and save it, and the other users will see the changes.
Next, you can see the appearance of the internal discussion tool (maybe too plain and with too few functions), with access rights limited to the users of that workspace, as every other tool in Groove:
The notes tool, which has more edition and format capabilities than the forum, is perfect if you want to write and edit text on the fly while other members of the group are reading and seeing the changes:
The sketchpad is one of the most eye-catching tools, because it allows all the users in a workspace to draw simultaneously, in real time, over the same image. In the example, the group was sketching some ideas over a photograph set as background. Worth to note: a digital tablet is nearly a must when using this feature.
The program has also its own photographic gallery...
... and a calendar, which in previous releases (before Microsoft) was compatible with Outlook, and now, for some incomprehensive reasons, it isn't any more:
At last but not at least, Groove hast its own internal mail server, of course under the same encryptation.
¿Is this program useful? ¿Is it really operative? It is hard to tell. The fact is that, when opening it the first time, the user will think that somehow it should be useful, but according to personal experience, it wasn't really so. The main reason for that may be the fact that the testing team didn't really need it, either because the members where meeting usually at the same physical space (the increasing use of laptops makes easy to meet and work in any place), or because the work itself didn't require any shared information... or for many other unknown reasons. The fact is that maybe because of settled habits, or any other reason, in every session the team usually ended up usig the traditional combination of e-mail+chat+FTP+telephone... And anyway, we should keep in mind that the work using this kind of programs is nearly never able to replace the face-to-face meeting, in the same physical space. There are things that still cannot be easily digitalised.
Nevertheless, it is possible that the real field of application of this program (maybe in professional environments like marketing and publishing, or in projects with a certain management complexity) is still to be discovered, therefore we leave the proposal to our readers, encouraging them to test the program with other users and share their opinions in the forum thread created for that purpose.
