Putting peer-to-peer in place

Putting any new technology in place requires careful consideration of an organization’s specific needs, available resources, and ultimate goal. For GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the search for a collaboration tool to be used by small teams working with external partners led them to peer-to-peer-based collaboration technology from Groove.

“We wanted to enable the quick need for small groups of internals and externals at GSK to collaborate in a very secure environment,” explains William Wood, director of collaborative computing research at GlaxoSmithKline R&D. “A decentralized, peer-to-peer solution makes it easier for end-users to manage their own collaborations.”

Research Triangle Park, N.C.-based GSK has been using Groove in pilot mode for one and a half years and put it into production in October 2002; during that time, their understanding of the nature of p-to-p technology has matured in terms of p-to-p’s benefits and usefulness in the enterprise, says Wood. The company uses Groove to collaborate with research and alliance partners, universities, and suppliers; develop legal documents; and coordinate clinical trials.

The p-to-p technology, combined with security and collaboration tools, makes Groove easy to use and offers plenty of control for end-users to set up and configure Groove spaces, says Wood. The security elements of Groove were also attractive because GSK often brings in external groups or partners on projects. GSK end-users also enjoy the presence awareness in Groove, “which provides a sense of connectedness that is missing from Web-based interfaces,” says Wood.

Indeed, presence is one of the strong suits of p-to-p applications. Because they link together multiple clients or peers, users can more easily streamline processes and workflow based on presence information.

“Presence is going to be huge on an ongoing basis in terms of how people are going to interact in the future on a much more synchronous way,” says Rob Batchelder, research director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn. “That’s one of the hidden benefits that’s going to come out of this peer-to-peer stuff — people are going to increasingly use presence and weave presence into their business processes.”

Wood says GSK users wove Groove into their work quickly and without needing a lot of convincing about its benefits. In fact, Wood recently got this request from a GSK end-user regarding Groove: “As I’m sure you know, Groove is very cool, very powerful, and rather addictive. To that end, I was wondering if I could get another six to eight licenses. I have a very important project starting up using two different vendors, plus GSK, three telecommuters, and I need to keep everybody organized.”

With some new additions from Groove on the horizon, Wood is excited about the promise of the forthcoming Groove Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) .Net, which will allow developers to add Groove and p-to-p capabilities to other applications.

“We think of Groove as a development platform, similar to the way Lotus Notes is a development platform,” explains Wood, adding that although this means they should be able to develop many types of applications with the Groove Toolkit for VS .Net, they won’t necessarily stray too far from their collaboration roots.

“The nature of p-to-p implies sharing, so it’s hard to imagine applications that wouldn’t have some collaborative component,” says Wood. “If you just look at the underlying engine in Groove, I suppose it could be used as a distributed database or as a distributed file system.”

With Groove Web Services also on the horizon, Wood sees the addition of Web services opening up more options, allowing GSK to integrate Groove with their Web-based portals, perhaps forming an online community where Groove shared spaces could be easily created for collaboration and relevant documents could move in and out of Groove.

Although GSK is pleased with how Groove slides into their businesses, other companies have been wary of p-to-p-based applications. The challenge, of course, is reassuring enterprises that p-to-p’s benefits can have a positive impact on the way they do business. With more p-to-p-based apps touting their flexibility, ease of use, and streamlined qualities rather than pitching p-to-p technology itself, broader acceptance is coming along slowly.

Wood says that it will take more success stories from those with p-to-p experience — including with products such as Groove — and a bit of a mindshift in terms of “openness to non-browser clients on the desktop” to convince more enterprises that p-to-p is a viable option.

“Not requiring much central infrastructure to set up collaborations was a key feature of Groove for us,” explains Wood. “To the extent that organizations and cross-organizational teams want to reduce dependency on central infrastructure, peer-to-peer will be successful.”

Source: www.infoworld.com