Quick take: P2P document sharing between platforms

2008-02-11

This is certainly not a formal review but I was doing some investigations into how to share files between team members, potentially on different (i.e. Windows and Linux) platforms. Groove is the peer-to-peer standard on Microsoft Windows, but there are free alternatives - having tried a few, Collanos Workplace seems to be the one that has remained on my desktops. It passes the test of "just working" (though I seem to remember it did need some Linux config tweaks), its not overcomplicated to use, etc. It does suffer a bit from some of the same assumptions as Groove - workspaces lack the ability to sync with local folders for example, which means backups in the traditional sense are difficult (and no, p2p doesn't mean no backups necessary - if you screw up on one peer, you screw them all.) But overall, its a good as any a place to start for offline remote team co-ordination.

Apologies but I can't find the original list of products I was trialling, but there are plenty of them. I do remember that competing platform Collaber had firewall issues so no dice.

Incidentally, for Windows document sharing, Foldershare (now acquired by Microsoft and integrated into Windows Live) does appear to be a very useful little tool. It does enable any normal folder to be just "shared", simply and effectively, so its worth a look. Equally incidentally, the caveat with all such products is they can tend to lack scalability - if you want to put tens of megabytes into the folder at a time, remember how much available bandwidth you have, and how many peers you're sharing with.