P2P Interactions for the Support of Knowledge Sharing in Networked Enterprises

The paper presents results from NOPIK, a current IST project, which is in its final stages. A number of tools to support team-based problem solving activities have been developed and evaluated with the project users and with overall positive results. The toolset also sports a distributed architecture where separate installations and their content can be synchronised with a central server. This in principle provides an architecture enabling collaboration and sharing in a relatively static environment, but in an open world where ad hoc connectivity is required a peer to peer architecture is needed and which is proposed and discussed in this paper. Our research has shown that organisations are usually sensitive to letting documents be stored off their premises and thus solutions such as P2P offer the potential to overcome these barriers and provide an ad hoc connectivity otherwise not easily achievable.