Dept. Of Homeland Security Chooses Groove, P2P

Ryan Barrett writes "Groove Networks has announced that their P2P infrastructure will power the Homeland Security Information Network, an initiative to increase information sharing between federal, state, and local intelligence agencies. (The initiative doesn't give the govt. more information, it just helps agencies better share the information they already have.) Groove Workspace has also been certified with two govt. security standards, FIPS 140-2 level 1 and NIAP CCITSE. In related news, Groove's developers have been diagnosed with acronym whiplash."

Comments

Many of you...

[Ieshan]

Many of you may know the founder of Groove (Ray Ozzie) as the guy who created Lotus Notes.

Just showing that he's been in the spotlight before, it's not some random Joe who's suddenly found his product approved for Government use.

Re:Interesting

[normal_guy]

Yeah, well, FIPS 140-2 level 1 and NIAP CCITSE is nothing to sneeze at. Sensitive but not classified information. Standards-based encryption (of course), but no physical security measures like smartcards.

Re:Hold on...

[Wellspring]

Oh, come on, you mean you haven't seen the TV show where the Gummint tries use the evil, forbidden power to fight evil???? You must not receive the Fox network. :)

In all seriousness, it is pretty impressive that Groove got their FIPS certification. My old company gave up once they saw all the hoops they would have had to jump though.

Re:It does, however...

[JabberWokky]

What do I see one day? A hit from the DOJ. They were looking for porno

Holy CRAP! There are healthy *human* *beings* in the government? With the same urges and activities as in every other field? Call the news media!

Seriously, working at a courthouse versus a finance company, I saw pretty much the same amount of people surfing porn from work. It's called being human. Not a big deal unless you happen to get called on it. That only happened once when the idiot started showing it to coworkers and HR got involved. Otherwise, anyone sitting on a router or proxy knows that there's a good deal of... err... personal internet use in every office.

--
Evan

Last Year

[Rascasse]

Actually, Mitch Kapor resigned in March of 2003.

Re:Interesting

[gunga]

Microsoft made a $51 million investment in Groove. See: Groove's FAQ and Microsoft's press release

Until this "strategic partnership" I was following groove, hoping they would take a multiplatform aproach.

I don't know how succesful they are, but being Microsoft only and having close ties to US "Homeland security" is not a very good way to expand their worldwide marketshare.

Anyway, there's still waste (I just noticed it has resurfaced)

Re:Hold on...

[ezzzD55J]

In all seriousness, it is pretty impressive that Groove got their FIPS certification.

For everyone's info, a FIPS 140-2 certification is 'only' a security certification for systems that process data that's "sensitive but unclassified" (what a strange classification! :)). From http://www.rycombe.com/short140.htm :

Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2(FIPS 140-2) is a standard that describes US Federal government requirements that IT products should meet for Sensitive, but Unclassified (SBU) use.

The standard defines the security requirements that must be satisfied by a cryptographic module used in a security system protecting unclassified information within IT systems. There are four levels of security: from Level 1 (lowest) to Level 4 (highest). These levels are intended to cover the wide range of potential applications and environments in which cryptographic modules may be deployed. The security requirements cover areas related to the secure design and implementation of a cryptographic module.

Where have I seen this before?

[dgenr8]

Where have I seen this before... a groupware platform built on required client software that costs money, and proprietary protocols? Ah yes, it was Mr. Ozzie's last invention, Lotus Notes. But this time, we also get to share our identities with the rest of the Groove network.

Notes is a case study in how proprietary groupware is doomed to lose out to standards. The same will happen with Groove.

As a recent piece opined, "the only thing harder than using Notes is getting rid of it"

And it seems to be true. InfoWorld's own CEO gave up his attmpt to get rid of Notes. Won't that make it difficult to migrate to Groove?

Here's a glimmer of hope for anyone still roped to Notes. At my company we have 200 of 450 desktops converted from Notes mail to Thunderbird/Sendmail/OpenLDAP and most of the rest will be done this week. Mainly, all it took was perseverance.

It's too bad Ozzie couldn't find a way to make Groove open and still make money.

Re:Where have I seen this before?

[Dave21212]

Obviously, you are an email admin, not a developer.

First... Notes is more than just email, in fact email is just a tiny part of it. Consider that the record-breaking websites for several Olympic Games were run on Notes/Domino. ("The Nagano Olympics and Wimbledon sites served record numbers of hits per day (630 million).")

Notes/Domino has been a model for incorporating standards into a development platform. They were one of the first to start using OLE/DDE over a decade ago and one of the first 4GLs to incorporate HTML and Java in the 90's. Right now, it has everything from XML/HTML/Java/J2EE to actually being an LDAP server when you want it to. Oh, and they don't implement these standards the way Microsoft does, they are actually very, very open. Which reminds me, they support Linux, OSS and there are even personal efforts on that front.

Oh, and I think you misrepresent what your article link states.... Notes is not 'hard to get rid of' because of thick clients, it's hard to get rid of such a valuable development platform.
p.s. Websphere Portal was moved UNDER the Lotus Software division, it's not dead, it's growing !

Please learn a bit more, then get back to me ;)