Suggestions one and two were definitely not on track. Suggestion three was a bit problematic. How do I use the Open and Repair option for a document saved in Groove?

There may be a more elegant solution, but here’s what I did. I right-clicked on the filename in Groove and used the Copy To… option to make a copy of the document on my desktop (outside of Groove). Then I opened Word, went to the File menu, chose Open, selected the file name of the document on my desktop, clicked the down-arrow to the right of the Open button, and chose Open and Repair:

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t recover the document.  So I used the “Recover text from any file” option:

I must admit that after all these years of using Microsoft Word I had never seen much less used this feature before. It did just what it said it would do. It got my text back, but lost all the formatting. Happily, that’s all I really needed in this case. I had an earlier version of the document that was working fine and that contained all the formatting I need. This procedure allowed me to recover all the text changes I had made in the interim.

This misfortune happened to occur in a Groove workspace that, for a variety of reasons, was only available on a single computer. Of course, that’s not the norm. Under more common circumstances, I might have been able to retrieve a good copy from another computer that had the workspace. On the other hand, because Groove is designed to keep documents in sync, perhaps my corrupt copy would have overwritten all the good copies in the other workspaces before I discovered there was a problem. For that reason, it’s important to make backups of your workspaces periodically. For more on backing up Goove, see this Microsoft article. As I write this, the most recent version of that article predates the release of Office 2007 SP1, which contains the hotfix mentioned in the article.

Although after reading this, I still have a question: Can people who buy Office Groove 2007 (retail box) or Office Enterprise (volume licensing) share data via the Internet as soon as they install Groove, or do they have to purchase GES? I have Groove 2007 through the MS Action Pack and I’ve been able to use it without purchasing additional relay services (as far as I know). Yet the blog post seems to suggest that peer-to-peer Grooving without a relay is limited to communication within a LAN. I’m confused.

Update, August 1: Ian Watkins has pointed me to the answer, found at the Microsoft Groove “How To Buy” page:

Note: Office Groove 2007, purchased as a standalone program or as part of Office Enterprise 2007, can be deployed without hosted or on-premise server infrastructure. In this configuration, users will manually create their own Office Groove 2007 accounts, which will automatically be provisioned to a Microsoft-hosted version of Groove Server Relay to enable data routing between Office Groove 2007 clients that cannot connect directly. To gain the advantages of centralized management and control of Office Groove 2007 clients, organizations require Groove Enterprise Services or Office Groove Server 2007. Organizations with large Office Groove 2007 deployments requiring directory integration, centralized auditing, network optimization, and data integration should purchase Office Groove Server 2007.