2007 MicrosoftВ® Office System Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

As you use Groove 2007, you build a list of people that you communicate and interact with. The people in this list are referred to as your Known Groove Contacts. Some members of this list will be contacts that you add to the list yourself. The list also includes members of the workspaces that you’re a member of. For example, when you join a workspace as an invited member, all other members of that workspace immediately become available to you for starting new activities. Similarly, any person who joins one of your workspaces (either by your invitation or someone else’s) immediately becomes available to you.

To see the list of your Known Groove Contacts (shown in Figure 7–13), on the Options menu, click Contact Manager. In the Contact Manager dialog box, you can do such things as the following:

• View contact properties

• Hide or show a contact

• View diagnostic information about a contact

Figure 7–13: The Groove Contact Manager allows you to hide, show, or list a contact’s properties.

To work with the properties for a contact, select the contact, and then click Properties. For example, you might want to keep track of the online status of some contacts more than others. To see (or hear) an alert each time a specific contact comes online, click the Alerts tab in the Contact dialog box, and you’ll see the page shown in Figure 7–14. You can set the alert level for the contact by moving the slider control.

Figure 7–14: You can manage the alert level for a specific contact.

While you’re setting alert levels for a contact, you can view options on the other tabs of the Contact dialog box to see which workspaces you share with a particular contact (which may be none), review your message history with this contact, and save the contact as a file so that you can store the contact’s information or possibly import the information for your use in a different program.

On the General tab, shown in Figure 7–15, in addition to sending a message or an invitation, you can create an alias for a contact (by clicking More) to specify a different display name. For example, rather than see your coworker’s full name-Robert or Victoria, for example-you might use Rob, Bob, or Vicky instead because that’s how you know them best.

Figure 7–15: You can initiate activities with a contact from the General tab.

Managing Contacts from the Launchbar

Like Groove workspaces, Groove contacts can be managed primarily from the Launchbar. Use the Contacts tab on the Groove Launchbar, shown in Figure 7–16, to add a contact, set your view of the contact list, send a message to a contact, view a contact’s properties, invite a contact to join a workspace, and other tasks, such as these:

• To add a contact to your list of contacts in Groove, click Add Contact on the Launchbar. In the Find User dialog box, type the name of the person you want to add, and then click Find. In the list Groove returns, click the name of the person you want to add, and then click Add.

• To delete a contact from your contact list on the Launchbar, select the contact you want to delete, and press Delete. Contacts that you delete from the contact list on the Launchbar might still appear in lists such as drop-down lists in the Send Message or Send Invitation dialog boxes.

• To send a message to a contact from the Launchbar, select the contact, and then click Send Message in the Common Tasks area. Similarly, you can select a contact and then click Invite To Workspace to send an invitation to that contact to join a workspace that you specify.

Figure 7–16: The Contacts area of the Launchbar contains many commands for working with Groove contacts.

Viewing a Digital Fingerprint

Groove 2007 assigns a digital fingerprint to each identity that you create for your Groove account. The fingerprint-which is something like a digital signature-is represented as a long series of alphanumeric characters. From time to time, you might be asked by another Groove user to tell them your digital fingerprint so that this user can verify your identity before sharing information with you. And, of course, you can ask other Groove users for their digital fingerprints as well.

To see the digital fingerprint associated with any of your Groove identities, on the Options menu, click Preferences, and then click the Security tab. If you have more than one identity for your account, select that identity from the Security Settings For list. (If you have only one identity for your account, which is more often the case, you won’t see a drop-down menu.)

When two or more of your contacts have the same display names, their names are displayed in red in contact lists, workspace member lists, and on their contact information cards. (In Groove, display names are the same if they match exactly after removing leading, trailing, and multiple embedded spaces and converting the name to lowercase text.) You need to know who’s who in a situation when contact names are the same so that you don’t send a message to the wrong person. To determine whether you’re sending a message to Robert Lyon your coworker or Robert Lyon the sales rep who just joined a workspace, Groove provides a dialog box, shown here, that lets you resolve naming conflicts.

To open this dialog box, right-click a name showing a conflict, and then click Resolve Name Conflict. Now do any of the following:

• Click View vCard to see details for the selected contact. This might help you distinguish between contacts of the same name.

• Click Alias Contact to open the Alias dialog box, where you can enter a unique display name for the contact.

• Click Verify Identity to go through the steps of verifying a contact’s identity.

You’ll learn more about verifying a contact’s identity in the following section.

Verifying Contact Identities

Verifying the identities of the people you work with in Groove is strongly recommended. It lessens the chance that you’ll share proprietary or confidential information with people you don’t want to. (Depending on your Groove installation, many contact identities may already be verified by an administrator at your organization.) Groove shows the verification status of contacts and workspace members by displaying their names in different colors, as described here:

• Black means you haven’t verified the contact or member.

• Green means that the person’s identity has been verified by you.

• Teal means that your organization has verified this individual. (Your organization’s verification of Groove users may provide you with enough assurance about their identities, but in some cases, you may also want to verify a user’s identity yourself.)

• Blue means that your organization has verified the individual but that this person’s account is outside your organization’s domain.

• Red, as described earlier, means that there’s a conflict in names. Groove displays these names in red no matter what their verification status is.

For more information about resolving name conflicts, see “Contact-Naming Conflicts” on the previous page.

Communication policies that your organization might set up for your account can affect whether you can communicate with Groove users who have a specific verification status. For example, you might be able to communicate with any contact without any warning or restriction, but you might not be able to communicate with Groove users who aren’t verified by an administrator in your organization.

In other cases, you might receive a warning before you communicate with a user whose identity has not been verified. You’ll then be prompted by Groove to verify the user in the Contact Verification Alert dialog box, shown in Figure 7–17.

Figure 7–17: The Contact Verification Alert dialog box may appear in cases when you communicate with a contact you have not yet verified.

If you see this dialog box, you can take one of several actions. You can click Properties to see the user’s properties, which might provide information you need to be sure the user is valid. You can click Continue to dismiss the alert and send your message or invitation to the user. You can click Cancel to dismiss the dialog box and not send your message.

If you don’t take one of these steps and want to verify the identity of the user before you send your message, select the user, and then click Verify Identity. The Verify Identity dialog box, shown in Figure 7–18, displays information about your current relationships with the selected contact, such as workspaces you share, the number of messages you have exchanged, and your organizational relationship. If you do not have any relationships with the selected contact, the Verify Identity dialog box provides instructions for verifying the contact’s identity by checking his or her digital fingerprint.

Figure 7–18: This dialog box shows you information about the relationships you have with a contact, which you can use for reference when you need to verify a contact’s identity.

If you are sufficiently assured of the contact’s identity based on the information you see, click Verify. In the Verify Identity As dialog box, enter an alternative name for the contact if you think you need one, and then click OK.

If you are not yet sufficiently assured of the contact’s identity and want to take more steps to verify it, click More Information. Follow the steps in the Advanced Identity Verification dialog box for checking the contact’s digital fingerprint, and then click Verify Identity.