Dr. Eric Rasmussen is a U.S. Navy Medical Corps commander. In July, at the request of the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Network and Information Integration, he led a civil military exercise on a lava bed in Hawaii.

The objective: improve civil-military collaboration for post-conflict humanitarian operations support.

In a letter summarizing the results of this summer's exercise, Rasmussen says: "Our experiences inside Iraq make it clear that the failure to get the right information to and from the edge of the network has been a significant impediment to post-conflict reconstruction. Consequently, distributed collaboration capabilities are the nexus of our proposed architecture, recognizing that disconnected users out at the edge are the norm rather than the exception..." Dr. Rasmussen recently published this summary on the project's web site.

Groove Virtual Office v3.0 was integral to the exercise, called Strong Angel II, as Dr. Rasmussen makes clear in his summary. Here are a couple of excerpts:"...Tools and processes that encourage and facilitate collaboration across many boundaries and their introduction has been a surprisingly potent success.

For Strong Angel we arranged a comprehensive collaboration tool called Groove (www.Groove.net), this plone site, several free instant messaging tools (e.g. Yahoo Instant Messenger) and VSee videoconferencing (www.VSeeLab.com) and we designed a need to contact participants daily in various corners of the globe with relevant questions related to their expertise over each of these systems.

Groove and vSee were able to create a nested relationship (VSee became a Groove workspace tool) and that combination worked exceptionally well as a secure, transparent, neutral, distributed, peer-to-peer technical solution...

"Classification systems in the military are badly outmoded and deeply entrenched. Strong Angel participants were able to detail occasions when seemingly foolish classification schemes directly contributed to non-combatant deaths. The best answer, from a Strong Angel perspective, is to protect the data, not the network, as we show highly effective methods for doing that.