Archive for the ‘PeerAware’ Category

PeerAware portable edition

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Just recently I became aware of that Google’s new browser did something peculiar with their installer. They did not install into the standard “Program Files” folder, rather they installed the program into \users\username\appdata\local\google\.

My first thought was that yes, this is a nice way to avoid requiring admin privileges. And Microsoft has stated that it is just bad programming that makes so many programs require admin privileges. On the other hand it does undermine the IT departments strict security policies. But then again, I don’t really care about that, I believe users are capable of managing their own computers just fine. And I certainly want to let any user try out PeerAware.

And of course, here it is: PeerAware portable edition.

What is great about this is that it requires no admin privileges, does not write to the registry and does not run any services. And all settings are kept in the same folder as the program itself.

The bad thing is that for now it does not have autostart and does not discover nearby workspaces. On the other hand, if you know what a portable edition of a program is I am pretty sure you will be able to to make this work for you.

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PeerAware Group Chat - Enterprise knowledge software

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

Enterprise knowledge software is the new phrase used to describe PeerAware. Initially this started out as “Desktop to desktop search” a few years back, but this did not mean anything to most people. And the advantage of being able to search across a network of connected computers and find documents based on content was interesting, but in reality just a technicality that most users just took for granted. This is fine, in reality it is all we could hope for. But it did not lead new users to try the program, almost no-one finds PeerAware through search engines, most people download the program through word of mouth, and simply because there are a few established knowledge networks running based on PeerAware. But I do want a name that sort of says something about what the program does, and recently arrived at the conclusion that the group chat functionality was what most users appreciated and used the most. That made me change the name to “PeerAware - Group chat”. But a month later I felt like this was oversimplifying things, and a new name was chosen: “PeerAware Group Chat - Enterprise knowledge software”, which should lead people into an understanding of what it can be used for. And with 1.04 out the door the new name is public.

Hope you like it,

Jonny

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Software messaging, IM style group chat

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

With PeerAware 1.03 out the door we finally have a much better messaging behaviour. With the file sharing and search parts of PeerAware stabilizing focus is now changing to making this into a great group chat solution. The first part of this is now done, and it is now much easier to get the attention of other PeerAware users who are running with the program in minimized mode.

When any user sends a message a notification window is displayed, modelled after how Windows Live Messenger displays notifications. Hence the behaviour should be something most users are familiar with.

PeerAware is of course a great group chat and knowledge management software program with file sharing support and a shared whiteboard.

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Knowledge sharing network

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

One of the main focuses while creating PeerAware has always been to create a system that supports creating a knowledge sharing network. With the latest release a few such networks have emerged and every day I am getting more feedback from these. Among the requests I have received is the possibility to create question-answer-documents based on topics discussed in a workspace chat. I have a few ideas for how to implement such a system, and expect one of the next beta releases to include this.

The intention then is to make sure that topics discussed in a workspace chat can be converted to a document that can be found through a normal PeerAware search. Watch this space, there is a lot more to come!

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So long as it is black

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black” Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography.

PeerAware knowledge software is much the same from this release on. Finally PeerAware runs on all Windows desktop operating systems from Windows 2000 to the latest versions of Vista. Of course it runs better on the later versions, basically due to support for service discovery. If you do run it on windows 2000 you will have to update internet explorer to version 6, but once you do it will work just fine.

For strange reasons SSDP and UPnP Host Device services are disabled on windows server operating systems, but PeerAware will work without problems even so. But if you do enable these services, computers running PeerAware on nearby computers will discover workspaces running on the servers and display these in the local network list.

In general it is recommended to run PeerAware on Windows server if you regularly have more than a few hundred people working in the same workspace, as network connections are not limited on these versions of windows, and performance is better. Also, in general you will want a workspace to be on all the time so it makes more sense to run it on a server. Both Windows server 2003 and 2008 work perfectly with PeerAware, just install and configure like you would on a desktop machine.

You can get beta 10 from the download page.

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Shared whiteboard beta

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Today Beta 8 of PeerAware is available for download. This release is an important milestone, as it marks the first time a collaborative component is ready for testing. PeerAware now allows a group of people to draw together in real-time and work on the same whiteboard. Basically this is like a simplified version of Visio, but the interesting part is that multiple users can work on the same diagram, working each on their own part, or just observing changes made by another person.

The types of diagrams that can be created are:
Basic diagrams with arrows, rectangles, circles and other shapes.
Flow charts with notes, processes, decisions, junctions, delays, or, merge, extract and more.
Network shapes with servers, firewalls, routers, bridges, laptops etc.
Mac and Windows UI controls for doing layout of program UI.
Workflow diagrams with human resources, legal, QA, accounting, inventorying, shipping and sales.

I guess more diagrams types would be obvious, like gardens or interior designs, but that will depend entirely on what requests I get. In reality I have no plans to make this into a full ArchiCad, AutoCad or Visio replacement, rather it should be a good alternative for prototyping, especially when you need to prototype something in a group spread across multiple locations.

And I guess we really need to get support in place for saving and loading drawings, but meanwhile I hope you have fun playing with it.

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Collaborate through a Whiteboard

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

As hinted earlier the next version of PeerAware will contain a collaborative shared whiteboard that allows all connected users to draw on the same whiteboard in real-time. For a preview take a look at this screenshot. All workspace scripts will go open source under the mozilla public license (MPL) version 1.1. For users and developers that means that anyone can edit existing scripts or create new ones, all based on open standards, html and javascript.

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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 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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