Putting p-to-p through enterprise moves

Roy Wilsker has a wish that undoubtedly resonates with other enterprise IT leaders. “We are trying to have people work together as partners,” says the Tyco Healthcare director of technology planning. “We tried e-mail, video conferencing, and building rudimentary Web sites to share applications. But it became clear that people needed a good, clear, sophisticated way of working with each other in a network.”

Wilsker looked into p-to-p technology offerings that promised to provide just that. After taking a leap of faith nine months ago, he now says that p-to-p has delivered.

Although once regarded as a limited and illegal file-sharing application, thanks to the hype about Napster, p-to-p is now gaining ground among enterprise chief technologists who see opportunities to simplify their network infrastructure and take advantage of improved workflow. A key factor leading to the technology’s increasing enterprise traction is the move by vendors to integrate p-to-p’s networking capabilities with XML and Web services.

In recent weeks, Groove Networks, NextPage, and Endeavors Technology all released upgrades to their p-to-p-based offerings, giving corporate customers a chance to extend the uses of the technology into more sophisticated applications. Groove offered its Workspace Version 2.5, which deepens integration with Microsoft Outlook and improves Web services interfaces for file sharing. NextPage released Folio 4.4, upgrading its Folio software for Windows XP with enhancements to the user interface, making content access and retrieval more efficient. Endeavors added enhanced document management capabilities to its p-to-p software.

“The name of the game here is integration. Many companies as well as vendors are recognizing that having scattered office documents and databases and applications repositories has been a long-term problem,” says Dana Gardner, research director of enterprise Internet infrastructure at the Boston-based Aberdeen Group. “The next big productivity boost is going to be in being able to have a much more common approach to data applications, documents, and Web content.”

As p-to-p gets integrated with enterprise applications such as Web services and XML toolsets, it presents a viable path toward increased workflow productivity, Gardner says. “P-to-P allows people to get an early advantage in connectivity and integrating process content and applications.”

Creating places to work

Tyco Healthcare is a Mansfield Mass.-based medical parts company and a division of Tyco International, which had $7.8 billion in sales in 2002. Tyco’s Wilsker is working to bring together the 20,000 computer users at the sprawling company. Initially he deployed Groove for IT-oriented projects, such as managing the migration from Windows 98 to Windows XP, and for data-process management tasks.

“[IT] likes to feel the pain first so we can understand how the technology works,” he says. And the pain hasn’t been too bad. The technology planning director plans to expand deployment to other company units, including research and development, in the coming months. “We expect to use Groove worldwide,” Wilsker says.

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.

“People were really concerned with sharing diverse content, whether it was proprietary file formats, PDF files, relational databases, or Web files,” Niemann says. To answer these concerns, FedStats uses software from Lehi, Utah-based NextPage. When users request information from the portal, the software searches for the information at partner agency computers and uses XML to make style sheets available for browser viewing.

The system has eliminated the need to buy individual servers for each agency and staff to manage them, Niemann says. “I’m a firm believer in [FedStats]. It enhances collaboration and reduces costs by eliminating middle infrastructure and middle employees where appropriate. It’s elegant and makes deployment simple by using XML Web services standards like SOAP to establish virtual messaging across the Internet.”

Niemann says there is a greater level of governmental involvement in p-to-p technology than is publicly known, “The military is an extensive user of p-to-p. You just don’t know about it. Remember, p-to-p has been there as a philosophy of the Internet. It was initially developed by DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] with the idea that if you had all out war, and one node was knocked out, it [the network] would still survive.”

Having proved its value for content delivery and management, p-to-p is also finding a home in the private sector. Deloitte & Touche U.K. uses NextPage’s p-to-p content delivery network to provide its roughly 2,000 auditors with external accounting and auditing information without having to wade through a jumble of repositories, says Peter Danson, senior manager of client services technology at Deloitte & Touche U.K.

“It saves us from having to do a massive amount of content management,” Danson says. “Otherwise we would have to download data files onto our server, route them to our environment, test them, and have them take up disk space.”

Likewise, Mitsubishi Motors North America, based in Cypress, Calif., has deployed Endeavors Technology’s Magi software to provide instant access to inventory information from dealerships across the United States, says Jason Rathbun, MMNA’s critical backorder administrator.

“We placed the software on the dealer’s computer in the parts department, where it turns itself on every morning, collects parts inventory reports, transmits it to a server with another piece of p-to-p software, which [then] collects it, scrubs it into the style we need information formatted, and sends it to our mainframe,” says Rathbun. “It’s all automated.”

Although p-to-p offerings are maturing, they may be a step ahead of the technology’s general acceptance. But as p-to-p is integrated into enterprise networks, the cultural roadblocks slowing its adoption will also disappear. EPA’s Niemann says, “There are cultural drawbacks [because of p-to-p’s] association with Napster. And the client-server model is difficult to overcome. But these issues are being dealt with as p-to-p changes the way people interact.”