A Groove customer speaks up

By Ann Harrison
Network World Peer-to-Peer Newsletter, 07/11/01

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, is running a pilot of Groove Networks' Groove 1.0 P2P platform, which is used to create shared spaces where users can swap information in many different file formats. The company asked employees to suggest ways in which the application could be used to collaborate, especially over long geographic distances.

Bill Wood, director of collaborative computing research for GlaxoSmithKline said the company got a particularly strong response from the legal team which wanted to use the tool to review and edit legal documents with partners. He said a development group also wanted to use Groove to test a piece of patent software, while the company's researchers said they could use Groove's shared spaces to swap information with universities about DNA sequences.

According to Wood, the company's operations staff, who are supervising the construction of a new building, have also asked to use Groove to share information with outside contractors and vendors. " Anywhere a team needs to work on documents together its pretty awesome, " says Wood.

But Wood also had a wish list of improvement he would like to see made to the Groove tool. Wood says he would like Groove to integrate Microsoft's NetMeeting and make it work through the company's firewall. He also wanted the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents and allow users to view the edits in real time.

This summer, GlaxoSmithKline plans to test Groove's relay service, which updates files for users after edits are made. One of the problems with the service, says Woods, is that the company only has one site in the Boston area. So if you are a company in Australia running Groove, and you send a note to a person at another company in Australia, the message has to go to Cambridge and back.

" They don't have a distributed relay service set up, " says Wood. " One of the reason that we may want to have our own relay services is that it would make a topology for our environment and we have more control. "

GlaxoSmithKline is also working on an application for a gene identification project that will allow anyone in the Groove space to do a " blast " search comparing a specific DNA sequence against other sequences in a database. Wood says he sees Groove as a platform for applications and not just a tool set. But he says Groove's application development still needs significant improvement. " We are doing it because we want to understand it and give them feedback to help prioritize it, " says Woods. " But it's still pretty raw. "

According to Wood, the ability to record and audit exchanges that take place in the shared space is another key feature he would like to see in the Groove platform. He says GlaxoSmithKline is not yet sure how much auditing they will do, but they want the ability to record the data.

" If someone leaves the company, we want to recover the space they are using, " says Wood. " We don't necessarily want to monitor everything they were doing, but you want a way to back up the data in a way that it can be restored. "

Finally, Wood says he's worried about controlling user's access to software they can add to their Groove environment. " We worry about people loading a nifty looking Groove tool that looks like it does something that is useful but actually sends all your files to a hacker, " says Woods.

Woods acknowledges that Groove's encrypted signing technology was developed to address this problem. But he says that implementing collaborative P2P tools still involves balancing users control and access to data with the risks of inadvertently downloading malicious code.

" It's not perfect, you still have to trust the people who are signed, " said Woods. " We are trying to walk a fine line. "