Network professionals are beginning to turn to peer-to-peer  collaboration tools as flexible and efficient alternatives to bandwidth-intensive, server-based technologies.

Peer-to-peer software lets end users set up workgroups on the fly, across the firewall, for sharing documents and conducting discussions, without having to run to the IT department.

But IT still needs to keep some level of control to guarantee data integrity and security, so rather than pure peer projects, companies are going with hybrid networks that incorporate servers for management purposes only.

Peer-to-peer collaboration tools are still in the early stages of adoption; the largest corporate deployment we found was 1,000 users; the next largest a few hundred, and after that, deployments were measured in the dozens of users. So it remains to be seen if peer-to-peer will find its niche at the workgroup level or will scale to enterprise dimensions.

Peer-to-peer applications sometimes come in through the back door, but frequently IT executives bring in the applications to empower users and save bandwidth.

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Peer-to-peer vs. client/server

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Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, a global management and IT consulting company in New York, is trying out Groove from Groove Networks  with several hundred users. With Groove, users can share files by dropping them into the Groove workspace window. When a user changes a shared file, only the changes are transmitted across the workgroup, rather than the whole file, which conserves bandwidth. The shared files can be encrypted for security, and Groove also can be used for instant messaging and to host discussion threads, which can be imported from Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes e-mail.

CGE&Y is a Lotus Notes user. "The problem is that replication through servers is a natural bottleneck. The more people use the messaging infrastructure to support collaboration and networking, the harder it got to manage our network resources, because the patterns of usage were all over the place," says John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas region at CGE&Y.

The company has about 50 teams that hold virtual meetings on Mondays and another 50 that meet on Fridays. Just before those team meetings start, the entire company network drags as people download materials for the meetings. Using Groove, workgroup members can share documents directly with each other with minimal effect on the network.