Peer-to-Peer for Collaborative Environments

Today, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has reached the peak of its popularity. P2P enables sharing of different types of resources and services. This book explains how advantages of this popular technology can be used to improve and facilitate work- and data-sharing processes in distributed collaborative environments. First the main security problems of P2P systems are analyzed and some novel solutions for securing structured P2P overlays are provided, in order to obtain efficient and reliable data management mechanisms. Then it is proposed to introduce a P2P framework into data storage and retrieval infrastructure of collaborative workspaces used by today s enterprise networks. This solution is meant to fit several application contexts of collaborative computing, thereby addressing some common problems about resilience of existing work-sharing systems. Such workspace organization should allow companies to realize a number of competitive benefits by using their hardware and memory resources more effectively. The book should be useful for anyone whose activity requires collaboration inside a geographically dispersed team in real-time and secure mode.