Problem

The R&D arm of a major telecommunications company wanted to learn about how to secure a peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative content management system for two reasons. First, they wanted to determine whether they could deploy P2P content management technology to their customers. Second, wanted to provide scientists in their R&D labs with a secure content management system to replace paper lab notebooks. Key requirements were to support both realtime and non-realtime collaboration, and to manage any type of content in a wide range of languages, including both asian and european langages.

Solution

Based on their requirements, the company decided to work with Nouveau Systems to develop a highly secure version of its Nouveau Alliance Content Management Service and NoteSpace Collaborative Notebook products. Key features that influenced their decision were:

Peer-to-peer architecture. The R&D group had a specific interest in studing ways to create secure P2P technology, and especially issues related to distribution and scalability. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform and Content Management Service is built on standard Java-based P2P technologies that provided an ideal platform for investigating related security issues.

Support for any type of content. Supporting a wide range of content was a critical part of the investigation as the company's customers make increasing use of multimedia and document formats, and a wide range of formats are regularly used in their R&D organizations. The Nouveau Alliance Content Management Service supports storing any type of content, including multimedia and document formats. The content can be retrieved using APIs or through a standard web browser. This enabled researches to investigate techniques for securing many diffent types of content.

Fully collaborative. Secure collaboration was also in important to the investigation because the company wanted to determine how well its customers could rely on secure collaboration as they interact and share content in a loosely coupled P2P network. The NoteSpace Collaborative Notebook application supports all types of collaboration, including both real-time and off-line collaboration, shared views, presence management, user identity, and digital signatures. The ability to support this range of collaborative operations made it simple to experiment with secure modes of collaboration.

Internationalization. The The R&D group wanted to ensure that the platform they selected for the project is fully internationalized because the company has operations in contries that use both european and asian character sets. They required support for fully globalized text in all aspects, including content, file names, and input methods. The Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform, Content Management Service, and NoteSpace Collaborative Notebook are all built with full unicode character support throughout, including content, file names, and input methods. As a result, the same platform and applications can be deployed world-wide.

Results

Working together, Nouveau Systems and a major telecommunications company developed a high-security version of the Nouveau Alliance Collaboration Platform, Content Management Service, and Notespace Collaborative Notebook. The resulting system can be configured to support any level of security, use a wide range of encryption algorithms and authorization services, and support security software from multiple vendors that conforms to the Java security APIs.