Putting p-to-p through enterprise moves

Aberdeen 's Gardner says that p-to-p's success may, in fact, ride on how well offerings incorporate Microsoft tools. "The linchpin here is how well you play off of [Microsoft] Office. The best bet for p-to-p value advantage is to play off of Office documents and XML," he says.

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Wilsker will use Groove with Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server software and Outlook e-mail to better manage information sharing within the company. "The tools in version 2.5 allow you to take documents created in Groove and publish them to SharePoint and make it available through out the company."

But Groove's collaboration offering isn't for everyone, Wilsker says. The architecture works best with small- to medium-sized groups using up to approximately 150 Mb of data, Wilsker says. "Groove is not something you want to use with thousands of people. We use it with groups of from five to fifty people."

Managing content through p-to-p

Organizations are also finding that p-to-p benefits accrue in the thorny realm of content management. They're using p-to-p to reduce the heavy lifting involved in managing content networks, supporting automated content-delivery networks that aggregate disparate documents for a variety of uses.

A two-year-old federal government project is creating a portal to give access to diverse documents and data through p-to-p networking between divergent federal agencies -- and it's getting positive reviews from a variety of managers. More than 70 agencies are participating in the development of the portal called FedStats.net.

Brand Niemann is an IT executive at the Environmental Protection Agency and a member of the FedStats Interagency Task Force. A central issue in the development of the network, Niemann says, is to provide a way to format the many different types of documents that would be accessed and displayed through the portal.

"People were really concerned with sharing diverse content, whether it was proprietary file formats, PDF files, relational databases, or Web files," Niemann says. To answer these concerns, FedStats uses software from Lehi, Utah-based NextPage. When users request information from the portal, the software searches for the information at partner agency computers and uses XML to make style sheets available for browser viewing.

The system has eliminated the need to buy individual servers for each agency and staff to manage them, Niemann says. "I'm a firm believer in [FedStats]. It enhances collaboration and reduces costs by eliminating middle infrastructure and middle employees where appropriate. It's elegant and makes deployment simple by using XML Web services standards like SOAP to establish virtual messaging across the Internet."

Niemann says there is a greater level of governmental involvement in p-to-p technology than is publicly known, "The military is an extensive user of p-to-p. You just don't know about it. Remember, p-to-p has been there as a philosophy of the Internet. It was initially developed by DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] with the idea that if you had all out war, and one node was knocked out, it [the network] would still survive."

Having proved its value for content delivery and management, p-to-p is also finding a home in the private sector. Deloitte & Touche U.K. uses NextPage's p-to-p content delivery network to provide its roughly 2,000 auditors with external accounting and auditing information without having to wade through a jumble of repositories, says Peter Danson, senior manager of client services technology at Deloitte & Touche U.K.

"It saves us from having to do a massive amount of content management," Danson says. "Otherwise we would have to download data files onto our server, route them to our environment, test them, and have them take up disk space."

Likewise, Mitsubishi Motors North America, based in Cypress, Calif. , has deployed Endeavors Technology's Magi software to provide instant access to inventory information from dealerships across the United States , says Jason Rathbun, MMNA's critical backorder administrator.

"We placed the software on the dealer's computer in the parts department, where it turns itself on every morning, collects parts inventory reports, transmits it to a server with another piece of p-to-p software, which [then] collects it, scrubs it into the style we need information formatted, and sends it to our mainframe," says Rathbun. "It's all automated."

Although p-to-p offerings are maturing, they may be a step ahead of the technology's general acceptance. But as p-to-p is integrated into enterprise networks, the cultural roadblocks slowing its adoption will also disappear. EPA's Niemann says, "There are cultural drawbacks [because of p-to-p's] association with Napster. And the client-server model is difficult to overcome. But these issues are being dealt with as p-to-p changes the way people interact."