Latest P2P technology
Today, a number of software vendors label their products as P2P in hopes of riding the Napster wave. These applications often take a peer-to-peer approach, letting one user connect to or exchange information with another, but the applications don't truly use a peer-to-peer architecture. Other applications use some elements of peer-to-peer but not all.
Most common are the products that have hit the market recently that don't match the traditional Napster definition of P2P. Instead, they're riding on P2P's coattails, sufficiently adopting the linking client approach. However, some applications still lean on a server to do some moderation functions, a derivative P2P approach that offers significant advantages over a purer approach.
Some products offer shared computer cache resources across a LAN, rather than across the Web. For example, Mangosoft's Cachelink Pro 3.0 is a LAN-based product that stores Web page information on the LAN to speed download time and reduce traffic over an Internet connection. Information may be stored on any workstation within the network, and the application leverages the computing power and storage space of the combined clients. This program links one workstation to another but doesn't leverage an Internet connection. This allows quicker access to information that has already been cached somewhere on the LAN.
Many vendors are using P2P approaches to create better ways to allow workers to collaborate on projects. Another product from Mangosoft, MangoMind, is an Internet file-sharing service that uses a hybrid architecture, containing elements of both peer-to-peer and of client/server technology. The service, which was launched in October, allows multiple users to simultaneously access and share files. MangoMind provides versioning and security features that you wouldn't get if you simply used e-mail for document sharing and collaboration.
Groove Networks provides a number of collaboration tools (chat, bulletin-board style discussion forums, file sharing, calendaring, and sketching) in a P2P environment. The key difference that Groove offers over traditional groupware tools is that all participants need not be online simultaneously. Whereas most groupware tools focus on providing online meeting capability for simultaneous collaboration, Groove's approach is more ad hoc. This program links one workstation to another but doesn't leverage an Internet connection, allowing quicker access to information that has already been cached somewhere on the LAN.
