P2P, naturally

Advanced Reality has unveiled Presence-AR, which is said to be the first peer-to-peer collaboration platform that embeds secure, real-time collaborative capabilities directly into existing and new applications.

Advanced Reality says Presence-AR enables enterprise and commercial software developers to add collaborative functionality to any application without modifying or rewriting its source code.

The company explains that Presence-AR operates at the data layer to transparently provide, via an application specific adapter, all the necessary infrastructure elements required to make any application collaborative. It uses a new data-centric model in which the data itself becomes collaborative and is not bound to a particular hardware platform, operating system, application or user interface. As a result, Presence-AR allows users to collaborate on the same data using different applications. Further, says the company, Presence-AR can dynamically adapt views of the same data for the capabilities of any access device including PCs, handhelds and mobile phones.

The software encrypts data as it moves between participants in a session and supports multiple authentication technologies to confirm a user’s identity including passwords, digital certificates, token cards, etc. Presence-AR also provides access control capabilities to enforce business rules that govern which data a given user is authorized to view and/or modify. To leverage existing security infrastructures, Presence-AR integrates with directory services such as Active Directory that contain role-based access control rules and file permissions for individual user accounts, says Advanced Reality.

Presence-AR allows a session to persist when the host signs off or is inadvertently disconnected, and AR provides synchronous and asynchronous collaboration within the same session. That enables participants, in different time zones for example, to join and leave a session at will. Presence-AR can also dynamically migrate between peer-to-peer and client-server network configurations to support ad hoc collaboration as well as server-centric inter-enterprise applications such as Web-based supply chains.

Advanced Reality reports that its new software manages:

• networking connections;

• data exchange synchronization;

• interoperability with operating systems, applications and directory services;

• session and resource security including encryption, authentication and access control;

• collaborative session resources;

• transparent fail-over in P2P or client-server configurations; and

• load balancing for enterprise scalability.