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January 01 2008 around Groove related technologiesHello, how are you ? I’m fine. This is the first time I spell a post I intended first to write with a keyboard. I use the speech recognition software of Microsoft Vista operating system. It is quite powerful. We are miles away of what was proposed just 18 months ago, especially for a non English native speaker like me. Many people asked me how I could envisage 2008 around Microsoft Groove related technologies. 2008 will be a transitory year. On one hand a set of Groove 3.1 infrastructures will continue to migrate to 2007 ones and on the other hand questions will start with Office Groove 14. Stay tuned. Really nice stuff to come ! Regarding Hommes & Process Groove related software evolutions; we reserve you also a set of good surprises. More to come shortly on the specialized blogs like the one of the GrooveIT! family on www.grooveit.biz. For now on I wish you all a Happy New Year. 2008 will be an exciting and tremendous year ! Jean-Michel Davault Founder and Managing Director Hommes & Process October 01 Case Study : Developing synergies and protection of intellectual property in the automobile industryHere's the second real case study of Groove to be presented to this blog. It describes very well a SMB working with larger compagnies efficiently.
Developing synergies and protection of intellectual property in the automobile industry
SNECI, Laurent Dahmani - Services Manager
About SNECI
•SNECI is a French operational consulting and services firm in the automotive and industrial sector. SNECI achieved a turnover of 240 million euros in 2005 and has a staff of 150 people:
§70 people in France
§80 people throughout 4 international offices
•The company works with 35 industrial partners across the world and provides:
§Project management services
§Assistance in product development contracting
§Quality services: system quality, quality in development, run quality (production)
§High-level supplier services: supplier catching ™ and supplier development ™ tasks, transfer of production tasks
SNECI achieves 95% of their sales figure abroad. It handles several projects at the same time, and has won 67 new projects over 12 months. The company works with more than 60 of the market's most demanding clients, such as Siemens, John Deere, Bosch Braking, Peugeot, Valeo, and more
SNECI's initial Issue
•Structure projects
•Allow the sharing of information and interaction among the different parties:
§SNECI
§Clients
§Subcontractors and/or co-contractors
•Coordinate activities of geographically dispersed individuals
•Equip itself with a reliable and secure solution able to protect intellectual property and ensure confidentiality.
Solution deployed at SNECI
•Deployment of the Groove collaborative work platform
•Deployment of an SNECI trusted domain by Hommes & Process
§Creation of the SNECI domain
§Management of users
§Management of security rules
•GTutorial e-learning tutorial
•GForce Backup personal archiving tool New practices deployed within SNECI's business
•Collaborative work: new work methods based on trust and transparency
Benefits obtained from the solution for SNECI
EFFICIENCY SECURITY RELIABILITY QUALITY
•Confidentiality and protection of intellectual property in Groove work spaces
•Perceptible improvement in client satisfaction
§Transparent and reliable information at clients' disposal as a result of shared work in a single location (Groove work spaces or virtual office)
§Visibility of results by the clients §Strong supplier/client interaction
•Quicker and more precise response to the needs of the end client
•Balance between the client's demands and the service provided
•The creation of quicker and greater added value ensuing from increased interactivity and a positive competition between the participants.
•Perfectly structured projects enable significant gains in efficiency and profitability. In conclusion
"Groove is a very good tool that is quickly accepted and adopted by every user. People see the importance of it immediately." September 06 Case Study : Canal Network & Productivity
August 18 Trust - P2P - Invitation ProcessIn my previous post, I was speaking about an "invitation process" without describing it clearly. You will find below in quotes Mark Ryan's way to present it. In green, you will find my comment(s).
" Groove invitations are more than you think! If the person you are inviting is not a known "Groover" to you what actually happens is an exchange of credentials and a "three way handshake" so you can bi-directionally authenticate each other. Also it is worthwhile to remember that while the new member is getting the workspace the invitor and the invitee must be on line at the same time - so IM or pick up the phone!!
Here's some more minutiae:
Inviting someone to a workspace To invite someone to a workspace: 1. Go to the workspace. 2. In the Workspace Members panel, enter the name or e-mail address of the recipient in the Invite to Workspace box.
Click More to see more options for adding or finding recipients in the Add Recipients dialog box. 3. Click Go to open the Send Invitation dialog box. 4. Assign a role to the recipient(s) from the drop-down list.
5. If you want to confirm the invitees' invitation acceptance, check Require acceptance confirmation. Note: This feature is automatically enabled for all invitations sent via e-mail. 6. Add message text if desired. 7. Click Invite to send the invitation. Groove does the following depending on the type of recipient(s) you selected:
The message contains instructions both for people who already have Groove, and for those who don't. People who already have Groove click a link in the message that opens the invitation. People who don't have Groove click a different link that goes to the Groove download page. Once an e-mail recipient installs and starts up Groove, the workspace invitation should open automatically. If the invitation fails to open automatically, the recipient can return to the e-mail message and open the file attachment to respond to the invitation. All invitations sent via e-mail require the sender to confirm acceptance before the workspace is sent to the recipient's computer. Note: If you don't have a Microsoft Outlook e-mail client, a message displays informing you that you cannot send the invitation using this feature. The message describes an alternative e-mail invitation process, which is to copy the invitation to the clipboard and then paste it into another e-mail or messaging client. You can also start the invitation process from any workspace list. Select the workspace and click Invite to Workspace in the Common Tasks pane to open the Send Invitation dialog box. Invitation alerts When you send an invitation, Groove keeps you informed about its progress by posting alerts. Note: For e-mail recipients, you don't see progress alerts until they open file attachment. From the table below, the first alert you might see is "Inviting Invitee": Opened, waiting for reply..." The table below summarizes the invitation progress alerts:
Notification
Meaning
Inviting "Invitee": Waiting to send...
Groove cannot yet send the invitation. The sender's computer may be offline or may not currently have a live network or relay service connection.
Inviting "Invitee": Sending, % complete...
Groove is sending the invitation either to the invitee's computer or to the relay service (if the invitee's computer is offline).
Inviting "Invitee": Sent, waiting for delivery...
The invitation left the sender's computer and will get delivered if the invitee is online. If the invitee is offline, the invitation is routed to the relay service.
Inviting "Invitee": Delivered, waiting for invitee to open...
The invitation has reached the invitee's computer.
Inviting "Invitee": Opened, waiting for reply...
The invitee has opened the invitation, and now must decide whether to accept or decline it.
Inviting "Invitee": Invitation Accepted.
The invitee has accepted the invitation but Groove is not yet sending the workspace because the inviter and all other workspace members are offline. Note that if the invitee accepts the invitation at a time when the inviter has gone offline, Groove will attempt to download the workspace from another member who is currently online, giving preference to members who are online but idle.
Inviting "Invitee": Invitation Accepted: Sending workspace, % complete...
The invitee has accepted the invitation and the workspace is now being sent.
Inviting "Invitee": Workspace sent, waiting for delivery...
The workspace has left the inviter's computer, though the invitee is still receiving it.
Inviting "Invitee": workspace delivered!
The workspace is successfully delivered to the invitee.
Note: If the invitee goes offline before receiving the entire workspace, the workspace gets sent to the relay service. The next time the invitee goes online, the workspace is routed from the relay service to his or her computer. Requiring acceptance confirmation is useful for security purposes. It gives you a chance to verify each recipient's identity before you send the workspace. If you check this option, then when the message recipient(s) accept your invitation, Groove displays an alert that prompts you to confirm the invitation. In the Confirm Acceptance dialog box, do any of the following activities and then click Confirm:
Copying an invitation to the Clipboard Groove includes standard features for sending workspace invitations as e-mail messages via a Microsoft Outlook client. If you do not use a Microsoft Outlook client for your e-mail, then Groove invitations with e-mail addresses cannot use automated features. If you receive a failure message after attempting to send an invitation to an e-mail address, you can still send the invitation by copying the invitation to the clipboard, and then pasting it into the e-mail client or messaging system of your choice. 1. Without closing the Groove invitation, select File-Copy Invitation to Clipboard... 2. Select the invitation settings you want and click OK. 3. Cancel the Groove invitation. 4. Open your e-mail or messaging client. 5. Paste the copied invitation into a new message. The pasted message includes the standard boilerplate text sent to recipients that includes information on downloading Groove, as well as link for accepting the invitation. " August 08 Trust and P2P... P2P and BusinessTo follow up my previous post "Trust, trust and trust ... It's all about Relationship" , it is important to write about "Trust and P2P" and then the impact between "P2P and Business".
So trust is about a relationship between two persons and relationships between persons. All persons are hence one another in a peer-to-peer (P2P) relationship.
Each person acts in an "unmanaged mode". which means, in theory, that each person controls herself and that no one else can control her and hence can not control her relationships. If that person is the identity creator, that person controls what she does, how she works...
What about the relationship with the second person? Who creates her identity ...? Herself? So there must be a mecanism which allows to share in trust only between these two persons. Hence the mecanism must be based on an invitation mode with a set of controls.
So person A invites person B and altogether A and B share and have the exact identical information. If person B trust person C and invites C in the common space that she shares with A, then person C gets a direct relationship with A and the data shared with A and B. You imagine that the content must be relevant for a common purpose between A,B and C. If you continue like that with new persons D, E , F and so on, you understand very well what "unmanaged" means. You can control the spread/propagation of that data but at a given moment how can you ensure the trust given to Z? Take also in consideration that within the distance of 7 nodes, everybody in the world is able to contact anybody...
In such an "unmanaged mode", if you work in a business environment and work with people you can rely on (trust), experience tells that each person is more or less able to control her P2P relationships up to 10 persons. Some people will lower this to 5 persons, some others will tell that they can manage without problem 25 persons.
In practice, in an organisation, you have an "identity initiator" and hence, even in an "unmanaged mode", someone is able to control the root which is the identity. You can also imagine that someone can get a tracability of "connections", a tracability of "usages" ... You can also imagine how "root certificates" can be crossed certified between two organisations... You can also simply imagine that a worldwide trust authority can certify to another third company that the certificates of the two companies are indeed those who they pretend to be.
With Groove software,
- Each person provides her own trust certificate or her company personal company certificate to selected persons.
Should the company not authorize some type of contacts, that person would be unable to communicate with the initially selected person.
That is what we can tell "Managed Identities"
- Each person builds her own space(s) and data is owned and replicated accross each invited and authorized member.
P2P business, which refers to Partner to Partner or Person to Person business, implies trust between these persons or partners.
Groove, with the way it is implemented, is a P2P Tool which can adapt to security levels between persons and organisations.
A P2P tool like Groove avoids to ask the question "where do I put the server?", "is the data on the server securely stored?"... With an infrastructure like Groove with and only with collaborative rules to work together, you can build easily "Trust zones", "Neutral Zones", ... "War Zones" ...
August 04 Trust, trust and trust ... Persons Always First ...Quite everybody uses today email as their first non-oral communication tool.
Most of you even know that standard email is not really secure but you continue to deal with it.
Some of you because you don't really have the choice, some others because you trust anough the system for what you need to do.
A set of technical people, with a set of technical tools, can of course make "email based communication" more secure...
The side effect of this security enhancement is that the persons who will use this more secured email based system will have less and less people to communicate with... Everybody must indeed be at the same security level which is not really simple to guaranty especially when your skills are more business, project, marketing driven ... that technical.
So rather than to have a complex system to deal with, which must be valid cross-company, which requires a set of IT's to discuss and work, let's start with what counts the most : the person/trust/trust/person or trust/person/person/trust paradigm. What or who is first?
In a person to person relationship, trust is critical and key. You can not really communicate with persons you don't trust. If you do it, you might be superficial or it might take a long time to achieve a common objective together. In the real world, giving trust is sometimes complex but you are assisted by a set of physical sensors and even feelings.
In a digital world you need to rely on a communication system which provides you a set of means to be able to trust another person.
Hence you tend to start first with "trust" from a technical point of view and you tend to forget the persons :
- you need to ensure that the other person is the person she is telling she is.
- you need to ensure that only the person you communicate with will be able to open it, unless she is already informed (pre-informed) that another person she trusts will be informed simultaneously.
- you need to ensure that no-one else you aready know will appear to you with the same name but with another digital identity.
Groove communication system is "person centric". Persons "are" Alway First (PAF). This means that each person is the center of her relationship with the other persons she trusts... Each person has a "digital identity card" which is unique and highly crypted. Contrary to e-mail, security is "always on" with Groove :
- you only work with persons you know
- your exchanges are crypted on the wire
- your data is crypted locally
- your data is crypted everywhere you share it with other known and trusted persons.
So, it's not about "access rights given by someone else", it's about "the rights I give myself, as a person, to another person".
So, it's not about a "password" which provides me access to a network or an application, it's about the security mecanisms associated to my, personnal, digital identity card which allow me to communicate with onother person.
So, it's not about "access rights given to data", it's about "rules" I provide to someone else to access that data and manipulate it.
It's all about trust I grant to a specific person and that the other person grants equally to me.
Of course, the other person can work with another person, with other persons ...
In other words, the data you provide to that person is not intended to go somewhere without your conscent because ... you trust that person.
Of course, in some organisations, you need to provide additionnal "global rules" but the core idea is "you share your trust with another person that shares it equally to you on the subject you mutually decided".
July 17 It's all about writting a book about GrooveThe purpose of this blog is to regularly write articles, chapters, remarks that will be published as a Groove book later on.
The objective of that book will be mainly business driven rather than just technical.
As I said during a Groove Partner meeting in Beverly already four years ago, Groove is not just about technology, it's about people.
So my posts will be maily driven by persons, by usage scenarii, by new ways of working and by business.
Using a Live Space has been chosen in order to interact with other key persons who would like to contribute to this work or with persons who need to know what can be done with Groove...
Groove will be used behind the scenes to better interact.
This blog will respect closely intellectual property rights and author rights.
Feel free to write me if you think that some elements are incorrectly quoted or potentially should not have been quoted in the manner it was.
To conclude I pretend to build together with you a valuable reference.
Post Scriptum : As I am nor an English native writer nor even American native speaker, please don't hesitate to come back to me from a pure language point of view ... ;-) ...
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