• Welcome page

• DD Discussion area for general discussions

• DD Calendar for events of interest to the community

• Community Files to be shared with the DD community

• DD Members area for leaving a short bio introducing who you are

• DD Projects for suggesting initiatives/projects that this community can undertake

• Hot Links for maintaining a list of favorite links to web sites of interest

• Member online presence

• Text chat

• Voice conferencing

The key piece of missing functionality was lack of integration with the e-mail distribution list that forms the backbone of the Decentralization community.

E-Mail List Integration Scenarios

When deploying a new messaging system (or almost any new line-of-business solution), often there is an existing solution - an existing user population and infrastructure environment - that needs to be given careful consideration during the planning and deployment of the proposed solution.  The two most important considerations are the co-existence phase and the migration phase.

During the co-existence phase, a majority of the users are still using the old infrastructure.  The old infrastructure needs to run in parallel with the new solution until the new solution is fully deployed, fully functional and the remaining users have been trained and moved over to it.  This final phase leading to the decommissioning of the old solution is often referred to as the migration phase.

Of the four integration scenarios described below, three are applicable as co-existence solutions while the remaining solution represents a plausible end solution.

Three E-Mail List Co-Existence Scenarios

Most co-existence strategies look for ways to leverage the existing application infrastructure within the context of the new solution being deployed.  The first e-mail list co-existence scenario is no different: simply host the existing center-based Decentralization web portal in the DDD Groove shared space using the Groove web browser tool as depicted in the following figure (click on the image to see the full-size version).  Simple and elegant but it effectively remains a center-based solution.

Figure 1. Scenario 1: Web Browser Tool Access

The second co-existence solution approaches the problem from an e-mail perspective.  In this scenario, a custom Groove tool is used to host an e-mail client in the DDD shared space. In this example, it is a custom Groove tool that hosts Microsoft Outlook 2002/XP. The most recent postings to the Decentralization e-mail list can be seen in the following figure. (Again, click on the image below to see the full-size version).  This Outlook 2002 Groove tool has the same full functionality as the Outlook 2002 desktop application and does require that Outlook 2002 (or Microsoft Office/XP) to be installed for this tool to operate.

Users can click on the icon bar (in the left-center of the image) to make the Groove tool display their Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, Deleted Items, Drafts, Outbox, Sent Items or Journal entries.

Figure 2. Scenario 2: E-Mail Groove Tool

The third potential co-existence scenario is the NewsClient Groove tool written by Hugh Pyle from Cabezal. Syndication of weblogs, news articles and headlines across the Web is increasingly popular - driven by the straightforward RSS format. NewsClient is a proof-of-concept "news aggregator" that provides a way to bring a tightly selected subset of this information - many thousands of news sources - into the context of a Groove shared space.

The NewsClient user interface is hosted as a Groove tool and architecturally, each instance of the NewsClient receives content directly from the RSS news services that have been configured by the manager of the shared space.  Groove's replicated data model is used to insure each member of a particular shared space has the same list of news services.

Since the Yahoo! Groups mailing list server also publishes a list summary as RSS, it will be possible to have the Groove tool automatically "subscribe" to email traffic on the mailing list.

Figure 3. Scenario 3: NewsClient Groove Tool

An E-Mail List Migration Scenario

An ultimate scenario, scenario 4, would include a custom Server Bot, a key architectural component of the Groove business collaboration platform, that would receive incoming e-mail from the web site list service and, as a member of the DDD shared space, add the new e-mail to its local Groove XML database for the Groove shared space.  The Groove replicated data model will insure that each member of the shared space has a consistent and complete set of messages posted by the list server.  Each user would be able to view the threaded e-mail discussions through the discussion Groove tool or a custom Groove tool.  The implementation of a basic list service server bot represents an extremely useful co-existence solution.

Figure 4. Scenario 4: A Two-Way E-Mail List Integration Strategy

To complete the solution, community members not only need to be able to respond to threaded discussions as they appear in the DDD share space, these responses or replies also need to be propagated back to the e-mail distribution list (and by implication, the host web site).  This can be accomplished in at least two ways.  First, the same server bot can receive notifications whenever someone posts a reply in the shared space and the server bot could initiate an SMTP transaction to post the reply back to the e-mail distribution list -- effectively acting as a gateway or bridge.  Alternatively, a custom tool (derived or subclassed from the discussion Groove tool) can be developed that posts replies to the shared space in the usual way but also initiates its own, direct SMTP transaction back to the user's SMTP host using the user's own credentials.  An example of the current discussion tool in the DDD shared space appears below.

Figure 5. Inbound E-Mail List Co-existence

Summary

The ongoing pilot to host the Decentralization Yahoo! Group e-mail discussion list in the Decentralized Decentralization Discussion (DDD) Groove shared space has proved to be a feasible, albeit a currently incomplete, solution.  This technical note has highlighted 4 co-existence and migration scenarios for integrating a web site e-mail distribution list into a Groove shared space environment.  Other considerations include migration of Yahoo! Groups' archive of previous postings, ultimate scalability and discovery of the DDD shared space.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Hugh Pyle of Cabezal for the information on NewsClient and his general feedback on this technical note.

Other Resources

• Architecting Enterprise Solutions using the Groove Networks™ Platform, Parallelspace Corporation, 2001.
• Parallelspace Resource Page for Groove and Groove Networks, Inc., Parallelspace Corporation, 2001.

Revision History

• 01/09/20 - Version 1.0.0 - mwh - original
• 01/09/23 - Version 1.0.1 - mwh - added feedback form
• 01/10/09 - Version 1.0.2 - mwh - layout adjustment

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