Putting p-to-p through enterprise moves

IT leaders use enhanced p-to-p technologies to cut costs and easily move data across networks

In practical terms, the p-to-p architecture offers Wilsker many advantages, including lower per-use deployment cost and a sharply reduced user learning curve, compared, for example, to setting up a mixed environment of shared applications, video conferencing, and e-mail. "Groove allowed us to create a collaborative infrastructure that enables users to quickly and efficiently create places to work," he says.

Groove Web Services APIs (application program interfaces), says Wilsker, will extend data to more and more users and applications. Features such as files, discussions, documents, calendars, and online presence can be tied into Groove Workspace. Plus, the integration of XML and Web services offered in Groove's Version 2.5 will enable easier collaboration by making an increasing number of Microsoft applications available in a collaborative setting, he says.

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.

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.