What slows Groove down most?

It is really frustrating to see people think and expect that Groove can do anything "just because it is easy". A space starts life and is empty, void. Then someone adds a file or two. Someone else adds three or four. It soon gets re-organised into folders.

And then the explosion happens. Suddenly it becomes a free for all and files are dropped in from everywhere. The result? Chaos.

As more files are added no-one thinks what the impact is. That is until a new member of the team joins the space. I have just joined a large space - 550 megs. It has taken my computer probably 5 hours of download on my broadband connection. (I made a mistake, I should have accepted the invite on my account PopG. We all make mistakes, don't we.)

These large spaces do no-one any good. Except from a feel-good factor, a buzz of "I've got a 550 megs space on my computer". It certainly is not productive! It is not productive use of Groove.

And sadly, I guess, it is what many, many Groovers are doing and suffering with day after day. Ah, I hear you say, "I have an 800meg space, and I'm not suffering." Just tell that to your next new space member.

Why is this bad, apart from performance? Just look at the content. Just look at the content. How many people use Groove for storing software downloads? How many people use Groove for sharing PDFs they have collected?

One of our users, Rick Lillie has this right. Using Groove to store large files is not good. Yes, it is right in some cases, but that is not the same as every file on your disk! Rick, of CalState, uses Groove primarily for thought sharing. He then tends to include external content (PDFs, Setup.Exe's) as hyperlinks.

Embedding a hyperlink into Groove costs nothing. It has no impact on performance or any resources whatsoever. It has a great positive impact on productivity.

That's is the beginning of an architecture that will scale, and scale and scale.