Microsoft announced that it plans to buy Groove Networks. Ray Ozzie, the inventor of Lotus Notes, will become chief technology officer at Microsoft. The plan is to incorporate Groove’s “virtual office” collaboration software into the Office desktop productivity suite.
Groove Virtual Office is a collaboration tool that lets people work together over secure Internet connections. Document sharing, calendars, meetings are all shared using a peer-to-peer design. Groove also uses instant messaging and lets workers automatically synchronize changes made while they were offline.
The acquisition should be completed in the second quarter of 2005.