From poor to powerful

Business applications employing peer-to-peer (p-top) technology have been slow to emerge.

Software vendors have trouble convincing corporate prospects that p-to-p isn’t just a way to avoid buying CDs. Companies have trouble seeing how p-to-p could improve their operations. Business p-to-p seems to be sinking into obscurity. Yet p-to-p has potential benefits tied to the growth of distributed, mobile, and contracted work forces.

Much of a company’s IT budget is spent maintaining and securing remote workers’ access to the internal network. With p-to-p, workers can form their own project-based groups to share files, hold meetings, engage in threaded discussions, and message each other directly. With p-to-p technology, you can clamp down on external access and your workers can collaborate, even if your servers are unavailable. At least that’s the idea.

Two p-to-p collaboration platforms, Groove 1.0 and HornShark, occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. Groove is a potent and striking Windows-only application that lets users collaborate without going through a server — well, for the most part, as we’ll explain. HornShark is comparatively Spartan in its look and functionality. Its use of Java and HTML seems more faithful to the cross-platform spirit of p-to-p, but the application is server-based.

We found Groove 1.0 rich and extensible enough to recommend its deployment, but with caveats regarding privacy and server dependency. HornShark’s limited functionality and poor usability make it a nonstarter in its current state.

HornShark is a Java Web collaboration server that delivers standard groupware fare such as to-do lists and tools for discussions and meetings. The application implements real-time and Web-based features but doesn’t integrate them.

The way HornShark handles meetings illustrates its vexing server-side shortcomings. If you add a meeting for your group, HornShark presents a fixed Web form with fields for the date, meeting minutes, and general notes but offers no place to enter the meeting time or to list the participants.

Another example: To add a meeting, a discussion topic, a group member, or a to-do list item, you click one button labeled Edit. The group’s entire home page turns into a confusing Web form that opens everything for editing at once.

The p-to-p side of HornShark, handled by Java applets that load into your Web browser, includes three real-time collaboration features: p-to-p chat, a community whiteboard, and file sharing. The chat tool is no better than AOL Instant Messenger or most ICQ (a public domain chat protocol) clients. It’s hard to tell who is participating, and because all the text looks exactly the same, following a busy conversation is challenging.

The whiteboard is somewhat better, allowing you to scribble and type over a background image while users watch. But you can’t perform even basic functions such as drawing a filled rectangle or changing the size of your text. The file-sharing tool lists all users’ published files on the group’s home page without organizing them into folders, making large or segmented projects difficult to organize. If a file with the same name exists in two different folders, the name is listed twice; you can’t tell them apart. If you add a file to your shared folder, you must manually update the server before the group can access it.

HornShark’s Java applets download quickly and allow the HornShark client to run on Linux and Unix, tricks that Groove can’t manage. The company claims that the solution’s process tracking sets it apart, but that component is simply an HTML table with a fixed Web form attached to each cell. There is no analysis, no reporting, and no real process management at all. In our time with it, HornShark failed to justify its cost.

In stark contrast to HornShark, Groove 1.0 is a comprehensive, polished, and extensible p-to-p collaboration platform. The client, called the transceiver, includes a large library of standard modules for discussion groups, p-to-p and server-based shared files, a sketch pad, voice and text chat, and scheduling. You can download new components and install them into Groove by effortlessly “injecting” them into its interface. The free Groove SDK empowers C++ or JavaScript/HTML developers to create custom Groove components and connectors to external applications. Groove 1.0 comes very close to being perfect for p-to-p collaboration. It misses by keeping users tethered to its servers.

The functionality, aesthetics, and usability of Groove components are so impressive that we’d use most of them on their own, something we can’t recall saying about any other integrated collaboration tool, p-to-p or not. The discussion tool is a good example. It organizes messages into threads, displays rich text (we wish it supported HTML), and manages file attachments. That may be easy to come by, but Groove also puts a real-time spin on discussions, immediately sending users’ contributions to all other users in the group. Groove displays changes to discussions, documents, shared files, and calendars — most data managed by its components — when they are made.

In true p-to-p fashion, almost everything in Groove is tailored for a voluntarily shared experience. You can surf the Web solo within Groove, or you can check a box to have all of the users in your group surf along with you. With the click of a button, you can synchronize your navigation of Groove so all group members will see the same display at the same time, a welcome feature if you’re running Groove during a teleconference or Groove voice chat. Groove always lets you break off from the group to surf, navigate the Groove interface or engage in a one-on-one chat with another member on your own.

At least for now, every Groove user, whether in a cubicle or at home, must be listed in a directory on the vendor’s presence server to connect with other users. Messages sent to offline users are stored in a Groove Networks relay server for later delivery. The vendor promises that companies will be able to host their own presence and relay servers, but that’s not quite true to the p-to-p vision. We’d rather see these features added to the transceiver so that well-wired workers can provide presence/relay services to their group, taking servers out of the picture entirely.

Groove’s privacy statement commits the vendor to the protection of your company’s private data. It’s all encrypted and unreadable by Groove Networks. But the same privacy statement reserves Groove’s right to share or sell users’ personal information, which is not encrypted.

Despite server and privacy issues, Groove is too powerful to shelve. Deploy it, but purchase your licenses in blocks with no users’ names attached. Have users employ aliases or nicknames, and keep company contact information away from Groove.