From peer to maturity

New peer-to-peer collaboration tools offer ease of use, bandwidth savings, but the jury's still out on scalability, management and data integrity.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

The ability to communicate using familiar applications was the primary reason Amerex Energy, an energy brokerage in Houston, chose Presence-AR from Advanced Reality  to automate keeping track of prices on its commodity broker-trading floor. The half-dozen brokers now using Presence-AR don't have to bother with a new, peer-to-peer application; they share documents using the Excel program with which they're already familiar, says Tito Toro, Amerex technology director.

"Excel has always been the platform of choice for them. What Presence-AR allows them to do is gather pricing information over the phone on different commodities and share the information efficiently," Toro says. Previously, the prices were tracked, written on a whiteboard and yelled across the trading floor by broker assistants.