This week, InfoWorld published a review of the Groove Server that dovetails into its review last week of MOSS. They summarize the benefits of a secure, distributed collaborative environment using Groove with SharePoint by saying that traditionally you would set up a collaborative website, open access to internal people, open VPN connections to external people and maintain a file server with permissions - which would take a couple of weeks to setup. Plus it would be IT's job to maintain things like rights and perform backups.  The larger the organization, the more cumbersome this becomes. In Groove the setup takes a few minutes and it's self-service.

As for the server(s), their conclusion is that "Office Groove Server is simply a cure for complexity." It is justified alone for its security and data retention capabilities.  They recommend Groove Manager for >100 seat deployments.  Abbott has published his views on this recently. InfoWorld found the server set ups a bit tricky. They recommended (correctly) 3 new boxes, as well as automatic data integration to talk to Active Directory so information changed in AD will propagate to the Groove Server.  Lastly, they recommend careful reading of all available TechNet documentation and careful planning.  They conclude by saying, "For those with teams and lots of collaboration requirements [ed. which company doesn't have that?], don't wimp out. Groove really is worth the effort."