While reviewing the specs and digging deeper into Google Wave federation, while waiting for a flight, I ran across a show stopper for any enterprise thinking about using this in deployment for now. Yes, it is beta. I don’t want to hear it. But, someone as your company has thought since this mightbe the next big thing you might want to get in early.
Currently, Google Wave does not have any granular ACL (access control list) support outside of allowing and not allowing. There is no reader mode. No Depositor. You either see and participate in the Wavelet or don’t.
The focus currently is on the actual federation protocol itself. Security wrappings will come soon enough. However, you should resist the urge to create your own server and federate with the sandbox and utilize and type of private information.
With the eminent rollout of attachments, spam filtering is soon to follow as well according to documents in the Google group. Actual federation does use SSL and starttls for communication, which is a huge win over most collaboration platforms. Yet the lack of individual wavelet control should have you testing the waters on the public server and playing in the sandbox itself. Just not connecting to federate in anything but an isolated, segregated test server.
The idea is still fascinating, jumping back and forth between real-time communication, sharing working data and email itself. A blend of this caliber would take the normal user a year to get used to in most enteprises.
