Enterprise 2.0

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

“Enterprise 2.0 in general describes the liberation of often previously inaccessible corporate information to be opened up to general discoverability, consumption, and reuse using a Web-based model”

The above quote as defined by Dion Hinchcliffe in his blog entry gives a good idea of what the new generation of tools try to achieve. And in defining this as part of what “enterprise 2.0″ tries to solve he also confirm my own experiences with modern enterprises. Information of any kind is hard to come by, and only a fraction of it ends up on internal web-sites where new team members can find it. Most information is documented in old emails, documents or notes from previous projects. Or worse, it is undocumented and hidden within the brains of key staff and a product of experience that new employees will only get after years of work.

PeerAware tries to unlock some of the information, and does so by letting employees share information from their own document collections, and by letting team members collaborate through searching and browsing shared documents, real-time chat and very soon through a shared whiteboard. But PeerAware does not solve all problems, and can in fact create new ones. Jerry Bowles’ post, Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 highlights some of the issues that also affect PeerAware:

Technological Barriers
1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?
2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?
3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?
4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?
5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers
6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?
7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?
8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?
9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?
10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

Many of these questions center around one issue. How do I control who has access to information and how do I keep that information away from everyone else. This is risk management for information workers, and in PeerAware I attempt to solve this through access control for workspaces. This is important, but a smaller problem than all the information that is kept hidden within a business.

I expect PeerAware to solve more problems than it creates, and by being aware of potential issues, policies can be implemented tho avoid these issues.

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A PeerAware tutorial

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Lately I have had about a hundred people downloading PeerAware a day. But not many of these ever visited the public workspaces I have running, and too often never run the program again. After testing some unsuspecting souls it became apparent that some things that were obvious and simple for me was quite difficult to grasp for new users. To help improve upon the uptake I have worked on a tutorial showing how to do the most basic things. My intention is to let this be part of an introduction screen that displays the first time you start PeerAware. Comments are always appreciated!

Tutorial: An introduction to using PeerAware.

The strangest thing is that for some reason the test page has problems running under the Opera web browser. Which means that I will have to look at that on monday, since my day-time job is the network code at Opera Software. It does however work after reloading the page a couple of times in Opera as well.

For creating the tutorial I used wink, a great utility that really impressed me with ease of use and power.

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PeerAware OpenSocial WorkSpace

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

The first PeerAware OpenSocial WorkSpace is now available. It is a simple modification of the OpenSocial Container Google released a week ago, and the source code is available here. A workspace is also available for testing this in the workspace list when you start PeerAware, and will just display friends listed in a workspace, along with information about yourself. As soon as Google updates their reference platform with the rest of the API’s I will add these as well to the PeerAware OpenSocial reference container. To see this in action, download PeerAware and join the OpenSocial WorkSpace.

The interesting thing about OpenSocial is that it makes it possible for third party developers to create widget applications that run inside PeerAware and integrate with just about anything. Watch this space, more will follow.

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OpenSocial integration

Monday, November 12th, 2007

OpenSocial is a new API developed by google and friends to make it possible to write social applications once that run on all social networks. I am investigating if I can make this work within a PeerAware workspace. Which means that I will make the PeerAware workspace into a container for the OpenSocial API and convert a couple of my applications into OpenSocial applications at the same time. At least the Texas Hold’em game should work well in this setting.

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Secure communication

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

With beta 5 all communication is encrypted by default to enable secure communication and sharing. Just encrypting the communication is not enough, it is also necessary to have a proper user management policy to control who accesses your workspace. Support for that is already built into PeerAware, all you need to do is set up which users are granted access, along with a password. Make sure that you tick the check-box for “Members Only” in the workspace configuration dialog at the same time.

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PeerAware indexing with iFilters

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

PeerAware uses the iFilter interface for retrieving text content from files as it indexes shared files.

As long as there is an iFilter for a file, PA will be able to retrieve the text content just like any desktop search engine. In fact, the iFilter interface is also used by MSN Desktop Search.

You can install additional iFilters if you would like to expand PeerAware’s capabilities. http://www.ifilter.org/ maintains a list of free filters. Others can be purchased from http://www.ifiltershop.com/products.html.

Finally, as you install software packages, they will often install their own filters as part of the installation process.

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UPnP

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is an architecture for peer-to-peer network connectivity. One of the most important features is the support for automatic service discovery. PeerAware (PA) uses this mechanism for discovering workspaces running on the local network. When a new workspace is started, PA users nearby will automatically discover this and display the workspace on the start page.

How it works is quite simple: Each PA service instance registers a workspace list device that is announced on the local network, and stores a list of active workspaces on the computer. Each PA client instance will search the network for PA workspace list devices and retrieve the list of active workspaces from each. Workspaces discovered are displayed in the local list on the start page.

PA will also use UPnP for controlling IGD compatible devices. Internet Gateway Devices (IGD) like ADSL modems and wireless access points are automatically configured for NAT traversal if UPnP is enabled for the gateway device.

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Beta 4

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Summer is over, and my coding sessions on PeerAware (PA) are getting more intense. With the latest release I focused on general stability issues and running the workspace as a service. I run my two test workspaces on a dual core rig, and I have XP set to receive Windows updates automatically. That ensures that my system is as protected as possible, but previously that led to the workspaces shutting down when the update routine did a reboot of the computer. And since I normally start PA as I log into my account that meant that the workspace remained closed until I logged on again the next morning. Since the security updates keep trickling out of Redmond, running a workspace as a service is essential for operating a stable network.

Two workspaces are active on my computer, one for general discussion of PA, and the other for playing Texas Hold’em Poker. Both are on the list of workspaces visible when you start PeerAware. You can play poker or chat, but file sharing is disabled.

The latest release also add the concept of presence to PeerAware. You have the option of setting your online status to ‘Online’, ‘Away’ and so on like in most IM systems. Status is visible if you hover over a user in the workspace user list.

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Distractions

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

Quite a few things are happening, and I am not able to code my usual 5 hours a day on PA. One distraction has been a reward I promised myself for when PA was made public. After it’s release I bought a camera along with a couple of lenses. So now I bring the camera everywhere I can, and try to get to know it.

Another side-track has been to make a few html scripts for PeerAware. I started out making a script for playing chess, followed by battle-ship, and finally Texas Hold’em poker. Well, the first two were simple enough, but I had never played poker before so I had to learn that by playing, reading, and watching World Poker Tour on TV. I had no idea how much fun poker was, and now I can see why so many play it.

The support for html scripts was not planned, and originally the chat window was implemented as a text window. In order to get smilies into the chat like in Microsoft Live Messenger, I struggled for a bit, and found that it was a lot easier to add smilies to a html document. And then I found that, hey, I could do a lot more with this, and added a small API for sending messages to other people in the workspace. And then it was really tempting to make a couple of games with this. So far I have made the mentioned games, and an adaption of cumulate draw (http://www.cumulatelabs.com/cumulatedraw/) so that people can draw things together. My Cumulate Draw adoption has not been released yet, but eventually it should be.

My final distraction is work. Daytime I work for Opera Software writing network code, and tomorrow morning I am off for two weeks in Japan working with a partner on a customer project. That should take a couple of weeks, and meanwhile I will not be able to make any updates on PeerAware. But seeing Japan should be fun.

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How it started

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Jonny Rein and I make PeerAware.

The idea for PeerAware came in fall 2002 while I worked as a software engineer for Tandberg Television. I had been with the company for 8 months when headquarters was moved and mass layoffs meant 60 developers had to go, myself included. But as Newton’s third law states, for every action force there is an opposite reaction force. My reaction was to find my own project to work on.

The idea that stuck was initially a peer to peer search engine. After losing my job I traveled around the world for 7 months, but kept taking notes every day. By the time I returned home the idea had evolved into a plan. I wanted to create a tool where people could share, find and discover information.

Finding the right information or people has always been difficult wherever I have worked. Communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging and intranet/wiki/blog are among the most common, but each has it’s own quirks. Traditional methods like phone-calls, meetings or lunch are great, but access to the people you need to talk to is limited. Often you might not even know exactly what you should look for.

PeerAware was created as an alternative or supplement to the other methods.
- Chat in a group when you don’t know who has the answer you are seeking.
- Chat in private when you know who to ask.
- Search shared documents when you are looking for a specific document or topic.
- Browse a colleague’s shared documents when you want to discover what he is working on.

As time passed PeerAware evolved into a tool that can do much more, but focus is still on collaboration, knowledge discovery and information sharing.

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