The following is the text of my response to a question, posed to me in an instant message. I intend to re-write it and provide explanatory notes, but In the interest of rapid publication, I have posted my response, verbatim.
Question: Can Groove be used in a Thin Client environment?
Answer: Yes*
*(Asterisk) means Groove can be used, using a thin client (i.e. a web browser), but there are caveats.
*means that Groove's support for the XMPP messaging standard allows it to interface with other XMPP messaging clients, some of which may use thin clients.
*means that Groove's native integration with Sharepoint, and connectors (EDB) for most commercial database standards allow interaction with users on thin clients.
*means that a Groove add-on product, PopG, allows a user to access a groove account, remotely by means of a browser with a Citrix plugin (a Java applet or ActiveX control).
None of these instances is the same as running Groove on one the user's own machine. Browsers are designed to display text and images with links. The basic language of the web-browser (HTML) was designed to create formatted displays of text and images with hyperlinks to other formatted displays of text and images. It is fundamentally centralized and static -- Centralized because the data and app logic reside remotely and static, because it requires a call to the remote server to know what to do next. Anything you do to try to make HTML more dynamic (i.e. "dynamic" HTML, javascript, applets, controls, etc.) has consequences that make the thin client less thin, create bandwidth overhead, compromise security (SSL is the best a browser can do), or make the user experience more complicated. By the time you surmount these hurdles, you will wonder why you were so attached to the idea of a "thin client" in the first place. Most of the people who sport "Power to the Edge" on their PowePoint slides are really trying to wire up the status quo -- Decentralization of IT or C2 is not in their plans.
Of course, I am assuming that someone cares enough to make sure that all of the users can surmount these hurdles, imposed by the thin client. If your business is to run server farms and to enable a handful of privileged headquarters elements can access these services, then you won't care. Ask LTG Wallace where collaboration and information sharing services were when the guys with guns needed them. He'll tell you that they weren't available.
So, this is a longwinded way of saying that you can have some "thin client" users in your environment, but if the plan is to bypass the installation of the Groove client and try to make do with web browsers, only, then one or both of us has got to go back for remedial training.
Thin clients and web servers are great, but when the chips are down, you'd better be packing some heat of your own. Just try to take away an infantry commander's mortars, by promissing him air support in return.... yeah right!
I'll go one further -- DoD has got to make a decision to 'shit or get off the pot with Groove.' I'm preaching to my choir, I know, but hey... Too many of us, myself included, have had to apologize for the Groove client and put Groove through certifications that other software from email to browsers to conferencing or chat applications couldn't dream of undergoing. We've made Groove so open and interoperabile in it's interfaces that you could make it work with anything you've got now or could expect to get for years to come--- and half of that shit doesn't even deliver value to the warfighters, yet the onus is on Groove to be interoperable with is.
As much as the public sector has difficulty with Groove, the Fortune 500's resistance is tenfold. Hierarchies have a touch time with Groove. Nimble networks and coalitions eat it up like crazy. The scary thing is not that Groove could go out of business for not developing a business model to sufficiently exploit these strengths (although that is certainly looking like a possibility). It's not so much that the big F500 companies will go the way of the dinosaur -- some will, some won't, and US small/medium-sized businesss are positioned to adapt--The market will dicate. The scary thing is that we (as a nation and civilization) have bet the farm on a state-based form of geopolitics that is becoming less relevant by the day--- and that we have entrusted all of our resources and power in hierarchically-bound security agencies whose very instinct is to surpress revolutionary change. The reason why DoD and the IC is "the last hope of Groove" is because the architects of NCW have seen this gap and are banging the drum loudly for change--- but look at the realities:
--The best answer they can come up with to fight a growing number of networked, celluar, non state-based threats is to create an intelligence czar to 'make all agencies work together' -- I call that pooling ignorance.
--After failing to deliver interoperability through standardization on [now obsolete] standards, they still insist that they know best for the warfighters and will pick the tools and deliver it to them through a thin client (NGCS) .... except, of course, one non-fighting warfighting COCOM has some braniacs who say they've got a collection of customized open source applications (hey, they're free!) that they are stringing together and will deploy to MNFI.
I'm sorry, Colonel, but you can't buy mortars, because we're spending the money to build you a better jet fighter to give you some first class air support....maybe. Give me a break! Read Van Creveld-- We are in some deep doo doo, boys and girls!
John,
Disappointed that you catalogued PopG as if it was a html-oriented browser experience in the same vein as Sharepoint et al, I thought we had moved on from there.
The Java/Citrix/Mirosoft browser hook-up to POpG is a gateway, nothing more, nothing less, to the full rich and unadulterated product of Groove Virtual Office. Not only that many of our users never even touch a browser, fully integrating the groove on PopG experience into their desktop as if Groove was actually running locally.
Thin-client Groove-on-PopG is, and a fully commissioned top-end Groove on PopG solution PopG would have no drawbacks alluded to above.
Andy
Posted by: Andy Swarbrick | 07 February 2005 at 10:48