Installation
The application is delivered as an NSF file in a self-extracting zip file. Installation is as simple as extracting the NSF and transferring it to your server. It's probably a good idea to make changes to the access control list to prevent use by unwanted users. Connectria provides little guidance and instructions for installation or initial set up, particularly with regard to the ACL. As an example, there is an [Admin] role in the ACL, but there's no indication of what it does. It appears that Editor access is required of anyone who will be sending emails. My testing showed Author access to be insufficient.

Testing
I tested GroupCast on my own server, which provided only a very small distribution audience. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to test all the modes of operation. I originally started testing GroupCast version 3.5, but Connectria announced version 3.6 at Lotusphere 2002, and I switched to the new version. If you download the software from Connectria's site, you'll obtain version 3.6, the latest version and the one that this review is based on.

GroupCast's agents run on the client side, which means that a workstation will be tied up during the time it takes to send out a message. This may not be significant if the distribution is relatively small, but it could become a problem for a large distribution. I had no ability to test a large distribution myself, so I asked Connectria to obtain statistics for me. One customer of Connectria's reported that it takes approximately two-and-a-half hours to send a message to 25,000 recipients--a rate of about 10,000 per hour. Of course, this is subject to the content of the message. Large attachments could slow things down considerably. Connectria tells me that the customer with 25,000 recipients has dedicated a workstation to the GroupCast function.

Security
One reason to buy GroupCast is to provide security over who can send mass mailings. GroupCast purports to do this by limiting who can use specific Group Profiles and who can use specific User Access profiles. This turns out to be ineffective in practice, however, because editor access is required to send messages. Since anyone with editor access can also create and edit the profile documents, the security is essentially all or nothing. If you can send a message at all, you can create the profiles necessary to send to any distribution under anyone's name.

Limitations
GroupCast does no checking of the validity of recipients in groups. If, for example, a group contains names of people who have left the company, messages will be dispatched to those addresses regardless. Of course, the server router task will attempt to send delivery failure reports. But, if the message had gone out under an alias such as "The Office of the President," there will be no valid address for the delivery failure reports to go to, and they will be lost.

I was happy to see that the user interface in the new version 3.6 is an improvement over 3.5. Nevertheless, there are still many instances of buttons visible when they shouldn't be, invisible fields that require editing, and error messages that are not meaningful. Most of this is insignificant, but you would expect more of a polished commercial application.