On this course and in the blogs we have seen wonderful things, what groupware can make or enables us to do. Usually outcome of groupware is good, because otherwise there would be no point to use it. Sometimes outcome of groupware can be something what users didn’t expected, like some courses group work when too many of group members decides to drop out. Sometimes outcome can suffer of some human error, which causes information lost. In some cases groupware implementation can be buggy and it causes something fatal to projects time tables.

From security point of view I think that the most critical security thing in groupware is users. It is always easier to do security audition to the code of the groupware than to evaluate every user of the system. Like other software, groupware systems contains now days several mechanism to stop users to get some information, what is out of their security level. Unintentional data deletion is not so easy anymore, thanks to these mechanisms. All the time these mechanisms are getting better and better, but can you say the same of the users? I bet for “No”. Of course old users of the system can and usually will be better users along the learning curve by the time. New users are still aways a new users and they will make mistakes. Then there is also users whos intentions are not so friendly and they will exploit designed system for their own purposes.

There are also some issues when groupware system and users of that system are Ok and outcome seems to be Ok too. That outcome can contain something, what some malicious user or hacker is looking for. This can be as ordinary as innocent blog writing of experiences at your summer cabin juiced with some nice pics taken with your mobile phone. If blog writing contained some details what fancy things can be found from your cabin, your innocent blog writing can act like a invitation card to some burglar. Location of your summer cabin could be extracted from pictures (modern camera phone has usually this nice GPS-tagging) and right time for entry could be determined from texts. By combining forum like Fillari-Foorumi and Sport-tracking services like SportsTracker could provide easier way for professional bicycle-thief to find expensive bike location. Users like me tends to record every workout including work commuting for statistical reasons and this would give quite good information when my bike could be found from some suitable location like office buildings bike-park. This is the main reason, why I don’t share my workouts to public...