The old age home for saved Groove account files

I was digging Groove, Microsoft's acquisition from Ray Ozzie and co. before he joined the evil empire and now part of Office 2007, way back in 2005 when I got a copy of the latest version. I also took a copy of my license file (the .grv file) and as a good citizen, backed it up. It sat on an external drive and there it stayed for months. The last saved copy was back in October of 2006.

I finally got around to trying to use the new Groove 2007 (we have a workspace on there for the Plumbers@Work gang) I was rather disappointed with this friendly error message:

Hmmm. Okay, so my license file is too old. Hate to tell you, but I don't have a newer one so this message is about as useless as it gets. Please import a more recently saved version of this account. Besides perhaps being grammatically wrong, what if you don't have a "more recently saved version", which is the pickle I appear to be in.

A few questions in the MVP groups yielded only one unflattering and hopeless response.

"Your screwed"

So I'm asking any Groovers (Groovers? Groovies?) out there. Am I? Is there a way out of this madness? I can't seem to find any contact info on the Groove site and even with all my ungodly MVP powers (read:none) I can't seem to find a way to get Groovin' again.

4 Comments

  • If you can send me mail about this issue, I can put you in touch with someone who can help figure out what is going wrong.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • ouch.. that's a new one.. :-)
    If it's an 'old one', i.e., v3.1 you may want to 'resurrect' it with a v3.1 installation and then update to the new Grv2K7.
    Let me know if you want any assistance.

    SBC

    PS - you can get Groove Developer workspaces at www.ctdotnet.org

  • From an old Groove employee who monitors alerts about "Groove" on the internet...

    This is not an unusual error (besides your problem with the usefulness and grammar!) What I mean is that the .grv file is not a license, but rather an entire account, including your keys, workspace membership, contacts and licenses. Since most of this information changes on a regular basis, a backed-up account file is only good for 21 days (I believe).

    As a 5 year Groove user across several major version changes and at least 15 computers (I always run a copy of the account on a second computer that I can use as a backup so I don't have to go to IT if one crashes), I've never lost an account, space, contact, etc.

    That said, your experience is not uncommon, but not the end of the world either. If you did purchase the software, you can get the contact information for someone at Groove to generate a new key for you, and you can reinstall v3.1 - you have a perpetual license for it. On the other hand, since you haven't used it for so long, you obviously did not receive much value from it. In which case, you might want to just download the new 2007 trial version to see what's changed.

    Good luck!

  • You can cheat and change the date on the computer. Worked for me
    D

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