Using wave in an organization can be a little challenging, when you don’t have Google Wave for your domain. Or if you would like to arrange a party or just be a group together. There are no problems if you only need to use one Wave, then you don’t need to invite all other participants to the new wave.

Google as implemented a group features in Google Wave. The function is build on top of Google Groups, so you have to create a Google group for each group you have. I would guess that this structure will create many new Google Groups with out any content in, since they will just be used for provision.

To create a new group follow these steps.

1. Create a Google Group on http://groups.google.com
2. Add the Google email of the users you want to add to the group.
3. Add the samplegroup@googlegroups.com to the contacts. Click the + sign and enter the group email. Just ignore the errors and press enter.
4. Add the group to the current wave.

I have created a video showing how this works.

To see content from the group, just search for group:demogroup@googlegroups.com. This will give all waves containing the group, so you can see what is going on in the group. When you are added to any of the waves, you will see the content in your inbox. This way it is much easier to find the Waves you have commented on.

A small issue is the wave username does not always correspond to the gmail username. So you need to find the users gmail account instead of their wave accounts.

I would also hope there will be an easier way to manage the groups from inside Wave, so you could just drag the users up to to the place they are using.

Using Groups is defiantly a thing, which needs to be improved for enterprise users. It could be a feature of Wave for my domain. On Wave for my domain it would make sense to be able to uses the groups you can define in the administration. These groups are your mailing lists or organization structures, so it will be a much more interesting place to administrate the groups. That way you don’t need to provision any other place.

For more information on Groups check out this Wave where the solutions is described in more details with a good FAQ.

I got my Asus Eee PC with a 10″ 1024×600 screen two weeks ago. It would be very useful to have Google Wave on this computer. The first thing I did was to attach the computer to a large external screen and then run the Wave. It worked pretty well because you could see everything.

The big advantage of a laptop computer is that it can be brought anywhere. Besides, its light and not bulky. Well, mine has a really long battery life that can last for a full working day if it set to standby mode when it is not being used. This also works well if you are going to write or note important points in meetings or events.

I used the notebook to tweet, write notes and work in wave.

If you don’t change any of the windows settings you cannot see much like shown on the following image.

It is fairly easy to work in wave with the Eee. The screen is not big, but it is possible to make the Wave panel larger to write well. There is still a large part in the window, which is taken by the header and form fields. The Eee has a mode where it is possible to mimic a larger screen and thereby roll the windows so you only see the wave.

Firefox also has to be in Full screen. This way you get more space to write on and it also removes the bar in the window screen.

The problem with the Wave exists if you start adding images or gadgets. They can often not fit into the small 600 pixels in height. I tried to use the Gravity Gadget on the computer and it was very difficult to get a full overview of the process because the screen was to small.

Typing on it is another problem I noticed in the beginning because I thought  it will be slow. There was too much JavaScript for the Atom processor. It only seems to have been improved I can now write as fast as I want.

The off-line wave mode does also work pretty well. What you type will get synced in with the wave when you get back on-line. This is also interesting if you want to save the battery by stopping the Wifi connection or to any conference where the Internet connection is unstable.

I see it is possible to use wave also on small notebooks like mine. They can handle a much richer environment than mobile phones.

I have been very pleased with how the production Wave system worked the first day.

Compared to the sandbox I enjoy working in the production system. It is nice to start it an almost empty mailbox, where you can start from. When you have said what you want you can archive the waves, and they will not pop in to you inbox.

I have had three (I’m a big shot) conversations with different peers in the wave system. It was easy and fast to communicate with them. The wave popped into my inbox, when somebody had any comments.

It would be nice to know if your peers was online, so you knew if the where able to respond. Or that you got a popup from the Google Talk gadget when a new wave was created for you.

There are some incoming waves that I have no reason to be a part of. I don’t know why these messages come into my inbox. It seem a kind of random. Is this the spam we will see in Wave. I don’t think anybody has created spam bots yet, thought it would be fairly easy to make.

I had a problem with my WP-BOT, which created a blog with the wave. The blog wp-bot.masteringwave.com uses the Wavr plugin. This plugin had hardcoded the some sources from the wave sandbox, because it nobody knew how it would be. I have created a but report on it.

I just logged into my new Wave today, I wanted to share what I have learned so fair.

Invitations are not sent all at once, but it seems like invitations are rolling out in batched. I still have not received an invitation one of my wave accounts.

There are some differences between the sandbox and the productive system. First the logo is from a “dev preview” to just a “preview”. Is preview then before beta?

The debug menus are gone. In the Sandbox it was possible to see call a debug menu, from where it was possible to see information about the wave. The menu was mostly used for inserting gadgets to the wave; it is now possible to from the menu. The debug is also removed from the blips. Using this function it was possible to see the raw content of the wave. This was very useful, when developing to the wave.

I had two waves in my inbox. One welcome wave with Docter Wave, how had made a short video on how to get started with Wave. These waves are read only, so they have managed to add that feature somehow. It is not possible to everyone else to change this. There is also a link to wave, which contains some videos for how Wave can be used. This is an excellent guide to get started.

The other wave is to send invites. You can enter a mail on how you want to invite. Google will then send out the invitations when the system is stable. So you cannot get you peers on wave yet. Google will probably see how the system scales before; they add the potential 800.000 users from just 30.000 in the sandbox.

The way you update your profile is also much easier. There is a wave you can use to add this information. Just select All waves and find the wave with your profile. In this wave you can edit your profile really easy.

Google has also made room for waves for Extension Settings and Setting for the wave. So all configuration is performed inside waves. Using this type of waves for configuration also makes it possible for third parties to have configuration waves. That way you only need to be in one place to configure your application.

I have been interesting in how the private messaging inside wave works. More specifically what can the participants how has the private message see. I don’t know why I have never tested it out.

I recorded a small video of how this works. (Sorry about the background noise)

The conclusion is that the participant in the private wave can only see the content inside the private wave. He cannot see it is a part of a larger conversation. That is also what you need. The participant in the private wave must not be able to see, waves he has not been added to.

This also makes sense from a productivity perspective. He should not see everything else; he does not need to comment on that.

So when you create a private wave, you need to remember that the user you are added cannot see the rest of the conversation. The content the new participant, should comment on needs to be copied into the private Wave.