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 TEST CENTER Infiltrating the enterprise By Maggie Biggs July 6, 2001 NAPSTER HAS BEEN front and center in the controversy surrounding music sharing, but behind the scenes, other industry groups and vendors have begun to examine what business benefits peer-to-peer implementations might offer. The promise of the technology now lies in its potential to increase processing power and user collaboration.
P-to-p purists define the technology as one that leverages distributed processors without making a distinction between clients and servers. An enterprise might use p-to-p for data exchange, application access, or distributed processing. In this informal p-to-p model, there is no control over indexes or directories, and security is generally loosely implemented. For corporate leaders, however, the informal nature of a pure p-to-p implementation does not fully address issues vital to conducting top-tier business, namely security, manageability, and workflow integration. The formalized p-to-p technology used in content networks allows users to access distributed information via their Web browsers. Although the distributed content may appear as a single interface to the user, security is tightly controlled, as is access to corporate directories and indexes. Integration with corporate workflow is accounted for, and network-based management is enforced. Combining security, manageability, and workflow automation with p-to-p constructs provides many benefits. Most importantly, processing power is extended, collaboration is increased, and greater workflow automation can be achieved. Many industry research companies, such as Gartner, foresee several new forms of p-to-p to account for enterprisecentric issues emerging in the next two years to five years. The formalizing of p-to-p, as it is referred to by Gartner, will blend in server-based technologies -- such as server-based indexing and directory services -- designed to ensure greater business benefits. P-to-p content networking solutions, such as NextPage's NXT 3 for example, enable content to be created and maintained in a distributed fashion while providing unified access to the distributed content via server-based tools and techniques. The biggest challenges for content networks that include p-to-p will be to implement functionality that ensures a high degree of security and to offer workflow tools that simplify their implementation, particularly in intraenterprise settings. Business and IT leaders who are considering p-to-p content networks also should be wary of platform constraints, file format limitations, proprietary networking approaches, and limited extendibility. Most enterprise settings contain a mix of legacy systems, client/server, Internet, and mobile platforms. Look for p-to-p content networking systems that support a wide array of platform and file system options. Regardless of where your content resides -- mainframe, mobile network appliance, client/server systems, and so on -- your solution will need to include support for content on those platforms and on the various file systems in play today. Examine also the server-side tools and techniques that p-to-p content networks implement, and consider customization and future strategies. The likely path for p-to-p technologies is to improve efficiencies by managing business processing tasks in a distributed manner. P-to-p content networks are a boon to IT leaders responsible for managing vast amounts of distributed content while leveraging that content to drive collaboration, productivity, and business-to-business interaction. But p-to-p infusion in the enterprise will not end there. Contributing Editor Maggie Biggs has more than 15 years of business and IT experience.
 RELATED ARTICLES  P-to-P gets to businessFrom poor to powerfulRELATED SUBJECTS NetworkingSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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