Regarding Groove and deal making, there's no doubt in my mind that it could be used effectively. But there's one nasty element about Wall Street and that's compliance and SEC rules and who gets to see what. Breaking those rules gets the enterprise into a very embarassing legal and PR fiasco. And deal makers do not want to spend their time worrying about these things, they're there to make deals; the banks have lawyers to handle compliance and SEC rules.

A related problem is handling overall membership authority within a Groove workspace and allocating the right level of access/security to existing users, much less how to easily introduce new users. For now, I envision the equivalent of the Novell or Win2000 Server administrator multipled by X where X is the number of Groove workspaces that contain sensitive material and require user rights administration. Workspaces could mushroom and create an administrative burden. The easy way out is to flatten the workspace either by allowing only very public material and a wide variety of members or only restricted material and a small group of allowed members. The intersection between those two situations is then relegated to no man's land which happens to be email, etc. This interaction then is lost context for the workspace.

This is not a fault of Groove per se, it's an issue that applies to any type of collaborative application, worsened in circumstance where there is a strict legal environment. I like Groove and tried pushing it at my last venue but it was too soon for people to catch on. I like the way it is pushing the CSCW envelope and making people think about collaboration online beyind IM and email now.